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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Not Playing the Game


Reed College, which has a lot to teach other colleges about autonomy, seriousness, and sense of self, has for a decade boycotted the US News and World Reports rankings. Its president writes:

Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.


Among the rankings criteria to which he objects are student retention and graduation rates:

[I]t is far from clear that high student retention is [an] unmixed blessing …. Rewarding high retention and graduation rates encourages schools to focus on pleasing students rather than on pushing them. Pleasing students can mean superb educational programs precisely tailored to their needs; but it can also mean dumbing down graduation requirements, lessening educational rigor, inflating grades, and emphasizing nonacademic amenities. At Reed we have felt free to pursue an educational philosophy that maintains rigor and structure—including a strong core curriculum in the humanities, extensive distribution requirements, a junior qualifying examination in one's major, a required senior thesis, uninflated grades (not reported to students unless they request them), heavy workloads, and graduate-level standards in many courses.