Learning Beyond Measure

When the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings of undergraduate programs at American colleges and universities appeared this week, I breathed a sigh of relief that my university continued to appear among the top 10 in the "national universities" category.

By RICHARD R. BEEMAN NY Times

As the dean responsible for undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania, I have found that the task of keeping alumni and donors happy about Penn’s status has been made much easier by our rise to prominence in those rankings. And of course a good ranking has also played a significant role in driving both the numbers and quality of our student applicant pool steadily upward.

These would appear to be good things — perhaps even cause for joy as well as relief. But I certainly felt no joy upon the appearance of the annual rankings, for, like so many college administrators, I believe these rankings are flawed in their conception and pernicious in their effect on prospective students and their parents.

I spend most of every day working to improve the quality of educational opportunity that we offer our undergraduates, and I know that my counterparts at other research universities do the same. How can we improve the quality and rigor of our writing programs? How can we involve faculty more effectively in advising our students? How can we provide more of our undergraduates with the opportunity to work with faculty on research projects? How should our liberal arts curriculum address the increasing preoccupation of both our students and their parents with vocational concerns? How should our curriculum reflect the ongoing revolution in information technology?

There is little in the U.S. News ranking categories — or in the rankings done by other publications — that bears on these questions of educational opportunity. One might think that two of the most important categories — "peer assessment" and "faculty resources" — would measure the actual quality of an institution’s educational programs, but they don’t. Peer assessments, in which college presidents, provosts and deans rate other schools’ overall academic quality, do not evaluate educational effectiveness. And the "faculty resources" category, while a reasonably reliable index of overall faculty strength and class sizes, does not measure the quality of effort expended by faculty in teaching undergraduates.

Even if the methodology were foolproof, the very idea that universities with very different institutional cultures and program priorities can be compared, and that the resulting rankings can be useful to students, is highly problematic. But perhaps even worse is that the rankings further exacerbate the rampant consumerism that is now so prevalent among entering students and their parents, encouraging an attitude that admission (and payment of tuition) to one of the "top 10 schools" is somehow a guarantee of a "top 10 education."

The one consistent source of satisfaction in my job is watching some of our students make the most of the educational opportunity the university offers them. Conversely, the most frustrating aspect of my work is seeing students respond passively, treating their education at Penn as something that is given to them rather than as something they must aggressively fashion for themselves.

I believe that intellectually curious and motivated students can achieve excellent educations at many different kinds of colleges and universities around the country, and those students will be much better educated than students who pass through "top 10" universities passively and without intellectual passion.

It may be the case that the U.S. News rankings are as conscientiously and fairly constructed as anything that has yet come along. But I fear that even if meaningful rankings were possible, they do more harm than good in serving the needs of prospective students. Rankings contribute to the erroneous notion that a first-rate college education is something that one is handed upon admission. But a student’s success in acquiring an education depends much less on consumer ratings of the product being offered than on the effort, dedication and creative energy a student invests in learning. Rankings both underestimate the amount of work it takes to get a college education and overestimate the importance of a university’s prestige in that process. In that way, they may do considerable harm to the educational enterprise itself.

Richard R. Beeman is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.