Eckerd College Stops Participating In College Rankings

By ADAM EMERSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: Jun 21, 2007

Likening it to a "beauty contest," the president of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg decided this week to stop participating in the widely used college rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report.

President Donald Eastman joined a growing number of liberal arts college leaders nationwide in lashing out at the magazine's method of annually ranking schools.

If U.S. News editors want the school's data, including student-faculty ratios and graduation rates, they'll have to get it from the federal education agencies that regularly compile statistics from public and private colleges, Eastman said Wednesday.

"They are comparing apples and oranges and bananas," he said. "I don't want us to participate in a process that says this is a good way to look at colleges and universities."

Eastman made the decision this week during a two-day meeting of the Annapolis Group, a Maryland-based association of liberal arts colleges. Eckerd, with about 2,500 students, is a member.

In a statement, the group wrote that a majority of the 80 presidents attending had "expressed their intent not to participate in the annual U.S. News survey."

Rollins College in Winter Park, the only other Florida member of the Annapolis Group, is not among that majority. Its provost, Roger Casey, said Wednesday that Rollins will continue to send the magazine its data.

If U.S. News editors will seek the information anyway, the 3,700-student college might as well ensure the data is accurate, Casey said. Doing otherwise would only compromise the No. 1 ranking the magazine awarded last year to Rollins among master's universities in the south.

Casey agrees with his colleagues that it "is problematic" to subject schools to a single ranking. "But there are a lot of people who are interested in this," he said.

Eastman, for one, knows that his ranking likely will drop. On the latest U.S. News college ranking, issued last summer, Eckerd was placed in the third of four "tiers" of the nation's liberal arts colleges.

College and university leaders have been reluctant to ignore the annual questionnaire the magazine's editors send them. Many families see the ranking as a one-stop shopping guide for schools. The University of South Florida, in its recent drive to join the nation's elite public universities, has made improving its spot in U.S. News and other university rankings a priority.

But Eastman says parents of students at Eckerd "are not reacting to U.S. News."

More and more liberal arts college leaders are expressing the same argument. Joining the rebellion are Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Barnard College in New York City and Kenyon College in Ohio.

"We really want to reclaim the high ground on this discussion," said Katherine Will, the president of Gettysburg College and the incoming president of the Annapolis Group. "We should be defining the conversation, not a magazine that uses us for its business plan."

Several of the group's members urged colleges this spring to at least stop responding to a key part of the U.S. News survey: soliciting presidents and other senior college leaders to rate the reputations of other schools.

Eastman has for years refused to fill out that part of the questionnaire. "I have felt that that beauty contest part of the U.S. News ranking was just downright silly," he said.

Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News, told The New York Times that the magazine applauded any effort to come up with new data. He added, though, that "if a few presidents don't want to participate, we understand."

Kelly said more than 50 percent of the presidents, provosts and admission deans who were sent the annual survey of colleges' reputations continued to fill it out. "We think the vast majority of presidents and academics are still supporting the survey," he said.

The results of Eastman's rebellion will have to wait until next year. The next issue of U.S. News college rankings is due out this summer and will include data Eckerd provided this year. Eastman's decision came after his college filled out the magazine's most recent questionnaire.

Information from The New York Times was used in this report. Reporter Adam Emerson can be reached at (813) 259-8285 or aemerson@tampatrib.com.