National College Rating Systems Should Incorporate Student Input

Who knows better what a college is like than its students? As it stands now, the US News and World Report college rankings take into account only what the universities submit. It then compiles these statistics, crunches numbers, and comes out with an overall ranking for the school. As a result, you may learn that your school is ranked 7th or 77th, but this number is based on relatively meaningless data on predicted graduation rates, alumni giving rates, and the always ambiguous 'selectivity rank'.

Of course, these factoids may actually be valuable in determining where someone may want to apply, but it seems to me a bit ludicrous to assume that high alumni giving rates implies higher satisfaction with the institution rather than the possibilities that either the alumni make more money after graduating or that the institution puts more of its resources back into eliciting donations. Similarly, while selectivity rank may tell you how hard it is to get into a school, a more rigorous admissions process doth not a better school make. Rather, it may just indicate that the school is better known and thus more students, both qualified and not, apply: as a result, admissions rates drop and selectivity rank rises.

While I'm not advocating the removal of all statistics related to freshman retention rates or what the 25th-75th percentiles SAT scores were of admitted students, I would like to suggest that if the purpose of college ranking is to give prospective students a better idea about whether they might like to attend, other kinds of information need to be included as well, and much of this info can only come from current students and recent graduates.