David Webster stated in 1986 that there are two elements that define college rankings. The first is that academic quality can be measured by selected criteria. For example, in many studies the reputation of the faculty and the selectivity of students are used as measures of an institution's quality. The second element is that using these measurements leads to an ordering of institutions. In other words, since quality is in short supply, there can be only one numberone school. Therefore, unlike classifications (e.g., Carnegie classifications), which group institutions by type, or guides, which give information on individual colleges (e.g., Peterson's Guide to Four Year Colleges), rankings order institutions from best toworst.
History of Rankings
This notion of ranking the academic excellence of U.S. colleges and universities is not new. For nearly 100 years various organizations have attempted to rank postsecondary institutions. In 1910 James Cat-tell from Columbia University offered rankings in American Men of Science that assessed the "scientific strength" of elite institutions by looking at the reputations of their science and social science faculty. Most early efforts applied the ranking to the college as a whole, rather than to individual departments. The rankings also tended to be based on what happened to the students after graduation instead of the accomplishments of the school's faculty. Cattell's work is an early exception.
E. Grady Bogue and Robert L. Saunders offered a brief history of graduate school rankings in 1992. They reported that the first graduate school study was conducted in 1925 by Raymond Hughes. He called on his fellow faculty members at Miami University in Ohio to draw up a list of quality universities and to identify national scholars in specific fields of study to serve as raters. Ultimately, in A Study of Graduate Schools of America, Hughes relied on forty to sixty raters to assess twenty disciplines for graduate study at thirty-six universities. He followed up this ranking with another in 1934 for the American Council on Education. In this report, he assessed fifty disciplines and increased the number of raters to 100. Graduate programs were not ranked again until 1959, when Hayward Keniston conducted his assessment of them. The list of schools was surprisingly similar to the work done by Hughes in 1925. Two other well-known graduate school studies were done by Allan Cartter in 1966 and Kenneth D. Roose and Charles J. Anderson in 1970.
Since that time, there have been several other notable studies that assessed graduate education. One major study was conducted in 1982 for the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils. It was far more comprehensive than the earlier efforts–covering thirty-two disciplines at 228 institutions. Then, in 1995, the National Research Council's Committee for the Study of Research-Doctoral Programs assessed forty-one disciplines and 274 institutions using over 7,500 raters. These 1995 rankings included both reputational ratings based on the opinions of faculty and objective data that focused on student–faculty ratios, number of programs, and faculty publications and awards. In 1990 U.S. News and World Report began to offer their rankings of graduate and professional programs, focusing on business, law, medicine, and engineering.
In general, the early rankings efforts were not distributed widely. Most of these attempts were viewed only by "academic administrators, federal agencies, state legislators, graduate student applicants, and higher education researchers" (Stuart, p.16). The audience, however, grew substantially when U.S. News and World Report began publishing rankings of undergraduate institutions in 1983. By the late 1990s, U.S. News and World Report, Time partnering with the Princeton Review, Newsweek partnering with Kaplan Testing Service, and Money magazine were selling an estimated 6.7 million copies of their special rankings issues annually. As Patricia M. McDonough and her associates illustrated in 1998, rankings have become big business. It should be noted that there are all kinds of college rankings besides those that look at academic quality. For instance, Money magazine determines the "Best College Buys" and the Princeton Review names the topparty schools.
In spite of the numerous methods employed over the years, academic rankings have been amazingly stable (see Table 1). Curiously, there is just enough change to give the listings credibility. The number-one school may change from year to year, but, in general, schools near the top of the list decades ago are generally seen near the top of the list in the early twenty-first century. In 1991 Alexander Astin contended that the stability could be explained by "the fact that beliefs about the institutional hierarchy in American higher education affect our perceptions of both graduate and undergraduate programs and are highly resistant to change" (p. 37), and that this "folklore" regarding an institution's quality affects students' college choices as well as the perceptions of institutional raters. Therefore, according to Astin, rankings reflect the myth of quality, rather than the reality of it.
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