Improving, One Rank At A Time

Last month, U.S. News & World Report released its 2003 edition of “America’s Best Colleges.” Harvard placed second to Princeton for the third year in a row, but Harvard officials were strangely complacent with being runner-up.

“Harvard is Harvard,” Robert P. Mitchell, director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told The Crimson. “It’s a great university and I’m sure we’ll continue to attract very strong students and alumni will continue to be supportive no matter what the U.S. News & World Report rankings may be.”

Mitchell’s statements are true. Harvard is a great university, and it will continue to attract very strong students. But these achievements are not enough. Harvard should not be content to rest on its laurels. Harvard, and all schools, should constantly strive to be the best and attract the best students.

It is this competition between schools that increases the quality of life at colleges and provides a better living and educational environment for all students. And while the U.S. News & World Report rankings of schools are often criticized for stressing the wrong criteria, the rankings help to foster this necessary competition.

Theoretically, quality students improve the education for everyone at a college by adding their viewpoints and skills in class discussions, study groups and extracurricular activities. These students come at a premium, however, and colleges have to work to attract them.

In its purest form, the competition between schools for high quality students works like an auction. Each institution tries to improve the package that it offers incoming first-years in hopes of convincing them to matriculate.

Improving the package for students comes in many forms, but one very visible factor is financial aid. Schools in the Ivy League—and other institutions that only offer need-based aid—cannot target and woo individual students with merit scholarships. Instead, they increase overall levels of need-based aid to attract many members of an incoming class. For fear of losing the best applicants, therefore, competing schools cannot allow their rivals to offer significantly higher need-based aid packages.

Financial aid policy changes at Ivy league schools in the past two years prove this point. When, on Jan. 28, 2001, Princeton announced that it was going to change its financial aid policy and replace all its student loans with grant money—lowering the average annual student debt by $5,000—many of the top colleges followed suit to compete with Princeton. By Feb. 21, Harvard had announced a proposed change in its own policy—to give each student an additional $2,000 in need-based grants.

In fact, the 2001 changes mirrored a similar across-the-board increase in financial aid at the country’s premier colleges that took place just three years earlier, in 1998.

Competition between schools creates other positive changes in undergraduate education and college life for students beyond financial aid. Schools constantly improve the quality of food and housing, department advising, class size and class offerings in an attempt to outperform competing schools and attract the eyes, and tuition checks, of prospective students.

But students need to know what competing colleges and universities have to offer. Anecdotal evidence can be helpful to a student making a matriculation decision, but by quantifying elements of school quality, the rankings allow what U.S. News spokesperson Richard Folkers calls “apples-to-apples” comparisons between schools. These explicit, quantitative comparisons provides a forum for direct competition.

Some critics of the rankings say that their calculation system is flawed. The critics show that schools can change their ranking in some categories without improving college life or undergraduate education. With creative advertising targeted towards college and university presidents, a school can inflate its “peer assessment” score, which accounts for 25 percent of its rank. With clever accounting methods, like counting incomplete applications as rejections, a school can alter its selectivity ranking and overall score.

Most categories, however, require true improvement to show an increase in rankings. To improve retention rate, for example, schools must make student life better—encouraging students to stay on until graduation. To improve faculty resources, schools must provide more funding and space for faculty. To decrease class size, they must offer smaller classes.

The benefit of the rankings—forcing schools to improve the quality of the undergraduate experience—outweighs the lost resources devoted to artificially raising a school’s ranking. And because U.S. News & World Report collects information such as retention rate, faculty resources and class size from many schools, the rankings create specific arenas in which schools can compete.

Without the cutthroat competition for the best students between schools, fostered by the U.S. News & World Report rankings, there would be less direct pressure for colleges to improve undergraduate education and college life. In a world without competition, colleges could all provide the same crummy undergraduate experience, and students would be stuck without a better option.

For the benefit of students, every university and college should heed the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Even at number two, Harvard should go down kicking and screaming—planning improvements for next year.

Judd B. Kessler ’04 is an economics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.