Hilltop memories

Inspired by TC, I've been going back and looking over my own production for the Hilltop News. It almost universally awful. But here's something I think holds up fairly well, and it displays a sentiment about higher education I believe even more strongly today. Original printed title: unknown. Written: 9/10/03. Publication date: unknown.

It’s good to see that my soon-to-be alma mater has been included in the top tier of liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report rankings released last August. Though I’m reasonably sure that this means nothing except that tuition rates will soon be raised, it’s always nice to be noticed. Especially noteworthy is that BSC’s rankings have been climbing, moving from a Tier IV school to number 66 in the nation in less than fifteen years.

On the whole, though, I think the rankings leave something to be desired. Because the schools with the best reputations are naturally going to attract the best students, they will almost certainly turn out the best graduates. I wonder how well the rankings really measure the education a student will get. Will a student at BSC be getting a significantly better education than one at the delightfully named Wheeling Jesuit University (Wheeling, W.Va.)?

Honestly, I only picked WJU as an example because I like the punk-bandesque name. But it leads to further questions that any good WJU alumnus might ask. How quantifiable is something, like a good education, which is essentially qualitative? This is a particularly good question when the numbers sometimes seem to be simply made up – I doubt, for example, that the student-faculty ratio at John Hopkins has doubled in the last year. The numbers used by U.S. News & World Report could be (and indeed have been) criticized for a number of reasons. But these numbers, and the report itself, are only the symptoms of the problem.

No one at BSC seems to mind that the editors of U.S. News & World Report are trying to rank colleges like golf clubs or football teams. Has BSC really improved more than a hundred schools in the country in ten years? Have the other schools simply slipped a great deal? Most likely, tweaking of the formulas used to decide “the best” have simply favored BSC. I doubt we will see many issues of the 2004 report in the admissions office if by some change of the formulas used Birmingham-Southern drops back down to Tier III.

The statistician mindset is particularly widespread in the United States. We want to rate and rank our colleges, our states, our hottest celebrities. I think it would be better for Birmingham-Southern, and for higher education as a whole, if schools would turn away from this ranking mentality and instead focus on what the actual educational experience is.

Here, someone - let’s say, for the sake of example, that it’s Robert Duvall - might object that the rankings are doing just that, trying to grade education in an easy-to-compare way. The proper response to this objection is that quality of education can’t be graded. It’s different for every student. Trying to make a list of the best colleges for every prospective student in the country, or even most of them, is nothing better than a way for U.S. News & World Report to sell more magazines. Birmingham-Southern, and every school which touts its rankings, only reinforce this regrettable tendency.

My favorite thing about this is that the hypothetical critic is Robert Duvall. What a great actor.