We're Number Three!

Harvard. A seven-letter word with a $9 billion endowment, it is the undisputed heavyweight champion of American higher education according to U.S. News and World Report--that is, with the exceptions of Yale and Princeton.

The decision to rank Harvard as the nation's third-best college (with Yale and Princeton first and second respectively), came in the weekly news magazine's annual "America's Best Colleges" supplement last September during registration.

News of the ranking made quite a splash at Harvard which had been ranked number one by U.S. News for six straight years.

From the moment the magazine handed down its decree, Harvardians reacted with a mixture of indifferent scoffs and astonished denunciations.

"I don't think these rankings have much to do with anything," President Neil L. Rudenstine said.

Nevertheless, the slip was amply quantified. The primary cause was the inclusion of a new factor in the method of ranking. This factor was the percentage of classes with more than 50 students, said Mel Elfin, the magazine's special projects editor and executive editor of the supplement.

Also important in the ranking slip was the faculty to student ratio. Harvard's ratio was 12 students to 1 faculty member, while Yale's was 9-to-1 and Princeton's 8-to-1.

The day was savored by Elis, but many of the 10,000 men of Harvard took the news with a grain of salt, saying the magazine had tinkered with its evaluation system to sell more copies.

U.S. News is facing competition from its two larger rivals, Newsweek and Time, both of which began publishing their own college supplements this year.

"It's a pack of lies," Gerardo J. Ruiz '00 said. "People are jealous of Harvard. [The magazine's editors] just felt like they had to give other universities a chance."

Yet for all the downplaying, the stigma of number three was too difficult to wash away in a snap. Many students were baffled that the home of Crimson Cash, The Tasty and Cornel West '74 was not the hands-down winner.

As a result, the rankings released during the first week of school amounted to more than a blip on the radar of the 1996-97 school year.

Although their effect is unquantifiable, the rankings permeated a variety of arenas throughout the year--from the Undergraduate Council to the sports field to our own senses of humor.

A Laughing Matter?

Witticisms and wisecracks were the weapons of choice for Harvardians--students and administrators alike--trying to deflect the threat posed by the giant "number three" hanging invisibly over University Hall.

"When we are ranked No. 1 we say how wise [the U.S. News] editors are, but when we are ranked something else we say they must be mistaken," quipped Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III.

Waiting in line to register, first-years who had recently navigated their way successfully past the nation's most selective admissions office--with a 12 percent acceptance rate and 75 percent yield--also joked about having second thoughts about attending Harvard after discovering they would not be attending the nation's top-ranked college.

The U.S. News rankings were fodder for funnies even in sports. At half time in the Harvard-Yale football game, the Eli band spelled out "#3" on the football field. Harvard supporters promptly responded by triumphing over the Elis for the second consecutive year.

Yet these jests were humorous only because many treated the low ranking as an important issue. All-time rushing leader Eion Hu '97 brought up this serious side before The Game.

"Harvard will find a way to get back on top," Hu said. "I guarantee it. We'll get more teachers, we'll get more professors. We're number one in everything except class size because [U.S. News] doesn't consider sections for class size anymore. We rank number one everywhere else."

Sinking the Titanic

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And so fell Harvard when its ranking sank dramatically due to large class size. Twenty-one percent of its classes had more than 50 students in the 1995-96 school year, compared with 9 percent of Yale's classes and 13 percent of Princeton's, according to U.S. News.

The large classes most responsible for yanking down the ranking were Core classes, of which about 80 percent enrolled more than 50 students, according to a senior administrator. Some Cores were gargantuan--Social Analysis 10: "Principles of Economics" initially enrolled 964 students the second semester and "Literature and Arts C-37: The Bible and Its Interpreters" enrolled 953 students.

Coincidentally, the year Harvard dropped in its rankings due to class size was the same year the Core was up for review, providing a perfect opportunity for Harvard to address the root of the low ranking.

However, Director of the Core Program Susan W. Lewis said she did not believe the rankings were a significant factor in the Core review process. "I did not hear the issue of the rankings mentioned in any discussion of course size," she said.

Patricia L. Larash '97, a member of the Core Review Committee (CRC), said her committee was trying to make Harvard the best possible in the "absolute sense and not the comparative sense. If [the committee's work] happens to bump up our ratings, then that's great," Larash said.

The impetus to expand the number of classes in order to lower class size in the Core was clear; only 86 Core classes were offered in comparison to 105 the year before, causing students to pack into ever larger courses.

When the CRC presented its recommendations to the Faculty on May 20, the Faculty voted to increase Core options by allowing more departmental courses to count for Core credit and by requiring that each Core category have a minimum of six courses each semester, up from the current average of 4.3.

However, more offerings do not necessarily mean a higher ranking will follow. More choice may mean smaller courses, but as long as they are larger than 50 students, they will further depress Harvard's rating.

It Don't Mean a Thing

The Revolution of 1776 started on the East Coast, but the ranking Revolt of 1996 began on the West Coast. A Stanford-led coalition of students protested the concept that colleges can be ranked at all.

The students made a concerted effort to convince colleges to with-hold information from U.S. News until the magazine either abandoned its ranking system or changed the system to present the top schools in a non-ordered list.

The coalition succeeded in convincing student representatives from six of the colleges in the Ivy League to encourage their schools to withhold information. Brown's abstained from the vote, and Harvard's rejected the motion because of problems with the bill's wording, according to Undergraduate Council representative Olivia Verma '00.

Rudenstine was sympathetic to the coalition and in an October interview praised a letter written by the Stanford president condemning the rankings in an interview in late October.

"The idea that you could develop a calculus to make any sense out of all the differences between colleges is not a very helpful or promising enterprise," said Rudenstine, who pointed out the absurdity of ranking jumps of 10 to 15 spots by some colleges this year.

Yet the U.S. News ranking was not the only judgment that Harvard deemed absurd.

When an April survey by the Yahoo! Internet search engine ranked colleges on effective use of the Internet for educational purposes, it put Harvard 64th out of 100 schools. Yale and Princeton were once again placed above Harvard. Princeton finished 12th and Yale finished 60th [opponents of rankings complained that the methodology for compiling data was not rigorous].

Nevertheless, looking at those students accepted to both Harvard and Yale, a remarkable majority still chose to come to Harvard. Last year, when Harvard was ranked first, 87 percent of these students opted for Harvard. This year, even after Harvard was ranked third, the figure was still 87 percent, showing that Harvard's allure remains supreme.

"When you're America's oldest and richest university and your yield is higher than the other schools and your reputation is world-wide, this [ranking drop] doesn't affect Harvard really one way or another," Elfin said.