SAMANTHA BLONS
Assistant News Editor
Every August, thousands of high school seniors and their families pour over the newly released college rankings from U.S.News & World Report, in which Pepperdine. These rankings have become the industry standard in the two decades since the magazine began publishing them.
However, the past few years have brought a cloud of mistrust among university officials regarding the magazine’s methodology. Some university presidents have even pledged to refuse to participate this year in the most heavily weighted component of the ratings system, the peer assessment survey.
President Andrew K. Benton said this survey, which asks college presidents and top administrators to rate other colleges based on reputation, is too subjective to be included in a scientific survey.
“An idea that started out as a clever marketing approach grew to be purportedly scientific, and I think that’s where it went awry,” Benton said. “When you throw in the subjective category — what other people think of us that have never been on our campus — it gets a little squishy.”
At a June conference of private and liberal arts colleges, most of the approximately 150 university presidents and academic deans present said they intended to stop participating in the reputation survey, according to a June article from CNN.com.
President Benton said he doesn’t think a university’s president, provost and dean of admissions, each asked to respond to the survey, can accurately judge the quality of an education at other schools.
“And yet we’re supposed to rank each of them one to five, five being the highest,” he said.
Proponents of including the survey in the rankings system say that it is a necessary component to judge how a college is perceived in the academic world.
But other critics, like Seaver Dean David Baird, think the system puts too much pressure on schools to rise in the rankings and distracts from their educational purpose.
“It makes us far too conscious of our ranking and preoccupied with doing things to raise our ranking,” Baird said. “I’d like for it to go away. But I suppose that not being possible, I wish it were less concerned with reputation. I’m not sure it’s a fair measurement of quality.”
But some students are concerned about the reputation of the university in academic circles.
“When you tell other people what school you go to, they’re aware of the rankings, so it still reflects on us,” said junior Alina Hardy, who says she thinks Pepperdine should rank higher than it currently does.
Though some Pepperdine officials are not fond of the overall ranking system, administrators do use the numeric data for specific categories, such as student-faculty ratio and freshmen retention rate, to see how Pepperdine is faring compared with other universities, according to Dr. Nancy Magnusson, senior vice president for planning, information, and technology.
Magnusson and her staff compile Pepperdine’s rankings in individual categories and compare them to past years. For example, in the student selectivity category, Pepperdine’s average SAT score for enrolled students has risen in each of the past four years. However, its acceptance rate has also risen, which could account for the fact that the school’s ranking in that category, worth 15 percent of its overall score, has dropped.
One of the categories in which Pepperdine ranks the lowest — at just 81st in the country — is the subjective peer assessment component.
“We care about rankings only because students, parents and alumni care about rankings,” Benton said.
Incoming freshman Dominic Hart didn’t read the university rankings, but he said his mother did.
“She’s paying for it, so she wants her money’s worth for my education,” Hart said.
Though Seaver Director of Admissions Michael Truschke knows prospective students look at rankings, he said he hopes they’re not relying solely on those statistics to make their college decisions.
“To say that students don’t use them would be naïve,” he said. “They do pay attention to them. I’d rather students do their own research and choose schools based on the attributes that are important to them.”
Though incoming freshman Tiffany Martz looked at the rankings when researching potential schools last year, “it didn’t contribute to her decision of whether or not we wanted to look at a college,” said her mother, Stephanie Martz. “All that information is fun to look at, but it didn’t deter her from looking.”
Freshman CJ Bakke said although he read the rankings, “it wasn’t really a big deal. I definitely looked at the rankings of every school I got into, but it didn’t make my final decision to pick Pepperdine over any other school.”
Like these students, Truschke thinks most high school seniors use the rankings as only a step in the process of choosing a university.
“In my eight years as Director of Admission I have never had a new student come up to me during their first semester and make the statement that they are happy they choose Pepperdine because our U.S. News ranking was 54th,” he wrote in an e-mail.
08-27-2007