According to this August’s U.S. News & World Report, Wesleyan is now the 11th best liberal arts institution in the country. While it once occupied the prestigious tenth spot in 2007, Wesleyan is now listed below many of its peer institutions, including Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore College.
But while Wesleyan’s ranking has dropped, the number of applicants have recently skyrocketed. There were 7,750 applicants for the class of 2011, which is a 28 percent increase in the past decade. If the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings don’t seem to affect the University’s reputation and apparent popularity—as seen by its stead increase in applicants—then what purpose do rankings serve?
Scott Cole ’09, who transferred from Skidmore College in his sophomore year , questioned not the rankings themselves, but the means by which they are compiled.
“The rankings are made by a bunch of people that don’t go here,” he said. “Why should they accurately reflect what it’s like to be at this school, or any other school for that matter?”
First compiled in 1983, the U.S. News rankings utilize seven broad categories to determine a school’s ranking: peer assessment, retention rate, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources and percentage of alumni who donate money back to the school.
These categories are then divided into 15 subfactors, including the Peer Assessment Survey, SAT/ACT scores ,and the percentage of full-time faculty. Other subfactors include graduation rate, student-faculty ratio, and acceptance rates.
Each of these seven categories is then given a certain value depending on how important U.S. News considers them to be. Add them together, and the composite weighted score is an institution’s ranking on the list of top liberal art schools.
First year student Sondi Stachowski was dismissive of the rankings, although she does admit that she utilized them in her college application process.
“When I was looking at schools, I cared about the rankings,” she said. “But I don’t put the same emphasis on them now that I’m here.”
Cole agreed, explaining that ,though he might criticize the rankings now, he did reflect on them at least to some extent when applying to college, both as a prospective freshman and as a transfer.
“The rankings influenced me as far as the school being in the top 20,” he said. “But I would not have chosen one school over another based simply on a few ranking points.”
Despite Cole and Stachowski’s indictment of the rankings as simply useless, senior Hannah Furstenberg-Beckman explained that they can be somewhat significant, as there are often important consequences to a drop in the rankings. It becomes a cycle, as a high ranking can lead to prestige, which can help attract well-known professors, which further generates positive rankings.
“One thing that does worry me is the professors,” Furstenberg-Beckman said. “A lot of professors have left for competing schools such as Amherst and Williams who are probably able to provide them with better salaries or a more appealing educational environment.”
Even if rankings may have been an influence on the class of ’11, their impact may decrease next year after Wesleyan stops using its ranking as a promotional tool in brochures, on the homepage and in other forms of media. On Sept.7, President Michael Roth signed a statement, along with 18 other college presidents, pledging not to use U.S. News rankings in promotional material. This differed from another statement released in June 2007, originally signed by 12 presidents (including those of Dickinson and Southwestern), which pledged not to fill out the U.S. News Peer Assessment survey.
The Peer Assessment Survey, which ranks how an institution appears in the eyes of the presidents, provosts, and deans at peer institutions, is the single most important category in U.S. News’ weighted scores, as it determines 25 percent of the total rank score.
Neither President Roth nor Senior Associate Dean of Admissions Gregory Pyke commented on Wesleyan’s ranking in the U.S. News and World Report.
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