College Rankings and Administrative Behavior: An Analysis 

What are College Rankings?  A. “League tables, also referred to as institutional rankings and report cards (Gormley and Weimer, 1999), are constructed by using objective and/or subjective data obtained from institutions or from the public domain, resulting in a “quality measure” assigned to the unit of comparison relative to its competitors.” (Salmi and Saroyan, 2007)  B. ”At this point, there are no fewer than 30 noteworthy rankings, ranging from broad rankings of national universities, such as Maclean’s and US News and World Report, to comprehensive international rankings, such as The Times Higher Education Supplement (The THES) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), to research specific rankings, such as those of New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and even to idiosyncratic rankings such as those that claim to identify the most wired or most politically active campuses.” (Salmi and Saroyan, 2007)

Proliferation of College Rankings  A. “However, the current obsession with ranking colleges and universities did not emerge until the late 1990s. In part it may have been the result of the national push for assessment and accountability that had blossomed in the 1980s.” (Hossler, 2000)  B. “In the past two decades demands for accountability, transparency, and efficiency have prompted a flood of social measures designed to evaluate the performances of individuals and organizations.” (Espeland and Sauder, 2007)

College Rankings: Major Players  Domestic College Rankings  US News  Forbes  Princeton Review  Washington Monthly  Newsweek  International College Rankings  Times Higher Education  QS World University Rankings  Academic Ranking of World Universities

College Rankings and Reactivity: A Theoretical Framework  A. “Because people are reflexive beings who continually monitor and interpret the world and adjust their actions accordingly, measures are reactive. Measures elicit responses from people who intervene in the objects they measure.” (Espeland and Sauder, 2007)  B. “In sociology, reactivity is usually depicted as a methodological problem. Campbell’s (1957, p. 298) classic statement defines a reactive measure as one that ‘modifies the phenomenon under study, which changes the very thing that one is trying to measure.’ Reactivity blurs the distinction between the act of measuring and its object which ‘contaminates’ results.” (Espeland and Sauder, 2007)  C. “Given their proliferation and their capacity to foster broad changes, both intended and unintended, in the activities that they monitor, social measures deserve closer scholarly attention.” (Espeland and Sauder, 2007)

College Rankings and Administrative Behavior  A. “In an examination of the effects of rankings on prospective students, parents, and college and university administrators, Erin Foley and I found that rankings appeared to have a greater impact on the alumni, trustees, administrators, and faculty of colleges and universities than on prospective students.” (Hossler, 2000)  B. “In numerous examples from around the world, governments and institutions have responded with words and deeds to the power of university rankings.” (Salmi and Saroyan, 2007)

Specific Examples  V. Specific Examples  A. “One professional colleague recently mentioned receiving subtle inducements from other administrators on campus to provide data that put the institution in a more favorable position.” (Hossler, 2000)  B. “With the passing of time, the institutions locked in this competition, especially public ones, may lose their ability to serve as agents of social and economic mobility. Their degrees are increasingly becoming stamps that ratify social advantage. Indeed, one unintended consequence of the rankings craze is that it generates behavior totally at odds with our rhetoric about providing educational opportunity for all students, regardless of their backgrounds.” (Lovett, 2005)  C. “Instead of investing in learning environments that help students of varied backgrounds and preparation succeed, too many institutions now spend their resources aggressively recruiting students with high SAT or ACT scores and other conventional markers of achievement that correlate most strongly with socioeconomic status. In turn, at many institutions those choices skew the allocation of financial aid from students with the greatest need to those with the most offers of admission.” (Lovett, 2005)  D. “Rankings have clearly changed how legal educators make decisions about how resources are allocated. Many deans described feeling conflicted between improving their ranking and improving the quality of legal education they provide.” (Espeland and Sauder, 2007)