Recent Updates by Topic

Popular Opinion Pieces

Op-Ed

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Don’t Join ’Em

Print: Email: Share:

Agree to Disagree

Agree to Disagree

The end-early-admission bandwagon is circling the Ivy League. With Harvard conducting, and Princeton playing first trumpet, Cornell is already said to be polishing its piccolo. But as the Cayuga’s Waiters melodiously remind us, “We didn’t go to Harvard” — or, for that matter, Princeton. If we’re looking to walk to the beat of anyone’s drummer, I suggest that we turn instead to a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon.

Reed College sits on a 100-acre plot, 15 minutes outside of downtown Portland, and an hour-and-a-half drive from the Pacific coast. Of its 1,300 students, about half receive an average financial aid package of $27,257 — nearly the entire yearly tuition. Reed boasts a 10:1 student faculty ratio and ranks in the top three of all colleges and universities for the percentage of graduates who earn Ph.D.s. It’s also one of the few institutions with an asterisk in the U.S. News & World Report college ranking system because it “refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey.”

The U.S. News survey is widely criticized for its poor methodology and its subjective criteria, yet most major universities cooperate with the magazine. As Reed College President Colin Diver observed, “Criticism of the rankings is nearly unanimous, but so is compliance with them.”

Those who criticize the rankings have good reason. Even a study that was commissioned by the magazine itself reported major failures in the survey’s methodology. The National Opinion Research Center’s report, funded by U.S. News, found that “the principal weakness of the current approach is that the weights used to combine the various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis.”

If I were the president of a major university, those seven words — “lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis” — would be enough for me to opt out of the survey. But if statistics aren’t your bag, there’s still ample reason to protest the rankings. As Diver points out in The Atlantic Monthly, the survey runs counter to diversity, self-realization and honesty — three ideals that get tossed around from time to time on The Hill (or so I’m told).

First, diversity: “The urge to improve one’s ranking creates an irresistible pressure toward homogeneity,” Diver observes, so that schools that “strive to be different are almost inevitably penalized.” By buying into the rankings, schools tacitly endorse the categories chosen by the magazine, even though — according to the magazine’s own study — these distinctions are based on fuzzy math.

In the past, Cornell has often broken from the pack. Our motto of “any person, any study” has yielded seven undergraduate schools, 70 majors, and 4,000 courses. We’ve paved a legacy of innovation, yet in the case of the U.S. News rankings, we’re passively coerced into following the fold.

The rankings also undermine the spirit of education. Call him crazy, but Diver takes issue with envisioning colleges as means to an end of personal wealth. The rankings “reinforce a view of education as strictly instrumental to extrinsic goals,” whereas “higher education should produce intrinsic rewards such as liberation and self-realization,” according to the Reed president.

Lastly, the rankings inspire dishonest admissions practices. In an Op-Ed in The New York Times on Sept. 18, Diver wrote that many colleges now make SAT scores optional, so that only high-scorers end up reporting their grades. Forget about the quality of their applicant pools — these schools stand to gain major brownie points from U.S. News. As convoluted as it may sound, schools are actually encouraging applicants to stop reporting SAT scores, solely to boost their rating in the U.S. News review.

In the dog-eat-dog world of college admissions, perhaps these old school values can be overlooked. But even so, how are we steering top applicants to Ithaca by reminding them that, year after year, we’re beaten out by every Ivy League school except Brown — not to mention non-Ivies such as the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT and CalTech?

To really compete with the Harvards, Yales and Princetons, we would need to follow a cutthroat set of recommendations most offensively outlined in columnist Mitch Fagen’s article of last week, “The Image Problem.”

He wrote: “The administration would have us believe that this ranking doesn’t really matter — what really matters are the quality of our professors, physical infrastructure and other University resources.” If our ranking doesn’t soon improve, Fagen predicts that our professors will pack up for “more prestigious” universities; our alumni support base will dry out; and, last but certainly not least, “it will be harder for Cornell students to get internships.” In this doomsday scenario, graduates will “find that employers are less impressed with Cornell and are less likely to even have heard of us.”

I’ve combed Fagen’s modest proposal for a hint of irony, and, having found not a trace, I’m convinced that he genuinely believes our student body to be “inferior.” Sadly, his recommendations for Cornell — making admissions cuts “almost entirely based on SAT scores and GPAs,” and slashing celebrated courses with high enrollment like Psych 101 — are spot on, if indeed we wish to break into the rankings’ top-10.

Fagen’s Nostradamian future is predicated on Cornell’s continued subscription to the U.S. News rankings. Should we reject the system, however, and preserve our dignity and commitment to higher education, we might encourage fellow institutions to follow our lead (and earn a great deal of media coverage to boot). Contrary to what Fagen might have us believe, Cornell would not implode if it opted out of the rankings.

“Far from committing suicide,” Diver writes, “Reed College has survived. Indeed, it has thrived. Over the past ten years the number of applicants has increased by 27 percent, and the quality of entering students, as indicated both by conventional SAT and GPA measures and by Reed’s internal ‘reader rating’ system, has steadily increased.”

Improving the quality of our professors, buildings and resources, as demonstrated at Reed, needn’t damage our overall prestige. The rankings seek to drive a wedge between Ezra Cornell’s credo and David Skorton’s administration, when, in truth, the two should uphold the same mission. And if your resumé is indeed met with blank looks or head scratching, just tell the interviewer that you went to some over The Hill university (you’ll score some points for the pun, at least).

Rob Fishman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbf25@cornell.edu Agree to Disagree appears Wednesdays.

• Add new comment
• Printer-friendly version
• send to friend