U.S. News Rankings Criticized

As universities across the country hold their breath awaiting the 2011 rankings of “best colleges” by U.S. News & World Report—just two weeks away—higher education authors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus warned parents not to rely on the scores for much more than entertainment. In an opinion piece on the Bloomberg financial website, they cataloged a host of problems with the rankings, which they said were subject to manipulation.

They noted that at least one university counted seminars as classes in order to report smaller than average class sizes and another counted nearly 1,000 part-time faculty as 319 “full-time equivalents” in order to report a high percentage of full-time faculty.

Reed College famously refuses to participate in the annual survey, which it says is not credible. The college has managed to thrive nonetheless, attracting top students and producing 31 Rhodes Scholars and two MacArthur “genius” award-winners.