U.S. News Puts Harvard Second

Giving students their annual bragging rights and critics their chance to bemoan the competition surrounding college admissions, U.S. News & World Report released its 2003 Best Colleges report last weekend.

Harvard tied Yale for second behind Princeton for the second consecutive year.

The rankings, created in 1983, have been a favorite target of those who say they spawn disturbing trends in admissions and fundraising.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan think tank, the rankings have a statistically significant effect on admissions yield and SAT scores of incoming first-years.

As a result, pressure has mounted among colleges and universities to make gains in key rankings categories such as admissions yield and percentage of alumni giving, higher education observers say.

“Everyone involved with college admissions and administration recognizes that the rankings have enormous impact,” James M. Fallows ’70, a former editor of U.S. News, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly last fall. “They affect the number of students who apply to a school, donations from alumni, pride and satisfaction among students and faculty members, and even the terms on which colleges can borrow money in the financial markets.”

In 2000, Hobart and William Smith College fired an executive who did not provide U.S. News with updated data that would have helped its ranking.

A Harvard spokesperson said the rankings have had no tangible effect on the University.

“Harvard is Harvard,” said Robert P. Mitchell, Director of Communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “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.”

Many critics allege that the rankings’ reliance on admissions statistics such as selectivity and yield is responsible for igniting the dramatic growth in binding Early Decision admissions programs, which force applicants to commit to attend a school in the fall of their senior year.

“The most important fact about early decision is that it provides a way to improve a college’s selectivity and yield simultaneously, and therefore to move the school up on national-ranking charts,” Fallows, also a Crimson editor, wrote in the Atlantic.

U.S. News spokesperson Richard Folkers said the rankings existed solely to provide families with access to “apples-to-apples” comparisons that are important in selecting a school.

“We don’t produce them as a scorecard or a horse race,” Folkers said. “We produce these rankings for the benefit of students and their families who are trying to make a vital educational decision.”

The so-called “Big Three” were in a virtual dead heat in most of the rankings’ categories, including academic reputation, graduation rate, percentage of full-time faculty, and students’ SAT scores.

But Princeton distanced itself in alumni giving rate, with 64 percent of its alumni making donations. Just 47 percent of Harvard graduates gave to the University last year, and 45 percent of Yale’s.

Harvard has bigger classes and a higher student-to-faculty ratio than both Yale and Princeton, according to the rankings.

Princeton’s student-to-faculty ratio is six to one, while Yale had seven students for each faculty member and Harvard eight.

Despite posting the lowest graduation rate, faculty resources rank, admissions rate, and alumni giving percentage, Yale tied Harvard for second on the strength of its per-student spending, placing second nationally. Harvard ranked tenth and Princeton was number 11.

The rest of the Ivy League was spread throughout the top 20, with the University of Pennsylvania tied for number four, Dartmouth and Columbia following at numbers nine and 10, Cornell at 14 and Brown at 17. Stanford, Duke, MIT, and the California Institute of Technology also tied for fourth.

During the past decade, a number of colleges have traded places in the rankings due to tweaks in methodology. Recently, each of the “Big Three” have all held the top spot as well as the California Institute of Technology.

In an open letter to Fallows when he was editor of U.S. News in 1996, Stanford’s President wrote that “the people behind the U.S. News rankings lead readers to believe either that university quality pops up and down like politicians in polls, or that last year’s rankings were wrong but this year’s are right (until, of course, next year’s prove them wrong).”

That year, Harvard fell from the top faculty resources rank to number 11, while Duke climbed from number 13 to number four.

Mitchell said these fluctuations stripped the rankings of any credibility.

“They change the methodology every year to sell magazines. My view is that U.S. News is out to sell magazines and we are out there to educate people,” he said.

According to Folkers, the methodological adjustments have primarily involved the addition of categories to provide a fairer assessment.

“We have a lot of critics and we’re not afraid of the questions,” he said. “Taking care of the schools is not our mission. It’s not something we do for the benefit of colleges. It’s something we do for the benefit of students and their families.”

—Staff writer Dan Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.