Across the USA In a piece that appeared on the editorial page of USA Today on Monday, September 10, President Joanne Creighton called on educational leaders to continue to speak out against the annual college rankings put out by U.S. News & World Report and others. "Not only should we refuse to give lip service to this specious and oversimplified labeling of our institutions, we should resist labeling our students with numbers, too. There are insidious parallels between the bogus ranking of colleges and universities by U.S. News and the ranking of students by their SAT scores," Creighton wrote.

Her piece, titled "Rankings Lack Credibility," appeared as a companion piece to a staff editorial in that same paper calling colleges and universities to task for focusing more on college rankings than on improving educational quality. Creighton has been a frequent critic of the annual U.S. News rankings and the SAT in recent years and has published a number of opinion pieces on these subjects in leading papers and educational journals.

According to Creighton, U.S. News's methodology is deeply flawed. "Recently," Creighton wrote in USA Today, "a former director of data research at U.S. News joined the increasingly vocal critics of the wrongheaded methodology and commercial motives of the U.S. News rankings. An internal study commissioned by the magazine in 1997 found, according to the Washington Monthly, that ‘the weights used to combine various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis.' Further, U.S. News focuses almost exclusively on input measures—including institutional wealth, faculty salaries, and acceptance rates—and almost entirely ignores the key question in evaluating a college: how well it teaches its students."

Creighton's piece may be found online at http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-09-10-ncoppf.htm. USA Today's staff editorial on the rankings is at http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-09-10-nceditf.htm.

For the record This year, U.S. News ranked Mount Holyoke 24th among best liberal art schools, as compared to 21st last year. (Why? While Mount Holyoke's "overall score" rose this year, the list of the best institutions is so tightly clustered that a higher score does not guarantee upward movement. In fact, very small fluctuations in the data can create what appear to be more significant changes in the rankings.) The magazine released its rankings last week. At the same time, the Princeton Review, another prominent source for annual rankings, named Mount Holyoke "the most beautiful campus" in the nation. Based on student surveys, Princeton Review's rankings of the "Best 331 Colleges" are in many cases far more droll in presentation than those of U.S. News. Among other categories: Mount Holyoke was #4 in "dorms like palaces," #11 in "great libraries," #11 in "stone-cold sober," #4 in "town-gown relations are good," and #15 in "students from different backgrounds interact." Princeton Review released its rankings earlier in the summer.