The increasing concentration ofwealthy students at highly selective colleges is widely perceived, but few analyses examine the underlying dynamics ofhigher education stratification over time. Toexamine these dynamics, the authors build an analysis data set offour cohorts from 1972 to 2004. They find that low-income students have made substantial gains in their academic course achievements since the 1970s. Nonetheless, wealthier students have made even stronger gains in achievement over the same period, in both courses and test scores, ensuring a competitive advantage in the market for selective college admissions. Thus, even if low-income students were "perfectly matched" to institutions consistent with their academic achievements, the stratification order would remain largely unchanged. The authors consider organizational and policy interventions that may reverse these trends.
Recent studies have suggested that a causal link exists between college rankings and subsequent admissions indicators. However, it is unclear how these effects vary across institutional type (i.e., national universities vs. liberal arts colleges) or whether these effects persist when controlling for other factors that affect admissions outcomes. Using admissions data for top-tier institutions from fall 1998 to fall 2005, we found that moving onto the front page of the U.S. News rankings provides a substantial boost in the following year's admissions indicators for all institutions. In addition, the effect of moving up or down within the top tier has a strong impact on institutions ranked in the top 25, especially among national universities. In contrast, the admissions outcomes of liberal arts collegesparticularly those in the lower half of the top tier-were more strongly influenced by institutional prices.
Processes of certification and evaluation are some of the most powerful institutional forces in organizational fields, and in the higher education field, rankings are a primary factor in assessing organizational performance. This article explores the institutional effects of the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings on the reputational assessments made by senior administrators at peer universities and liberal arts colleges. In the estimation of structural equation models, we found that published college rankings have a significant impact on future peer assessments, independent of changes in organizational quality and performance and even of prior peer assessments of reputation. In 1983, when U.S. News & World Report published its first set of college rankings, Oberlin College ranked fifth among the nation's liberal arts colleges. This was hardly surprising as the ranking was based entirely upon reputation among its peers, and Oberlin had a long and storied history. It had a particularly strong reputation for placing students in top graduate programs, for decades ranking first among liberal arts colleges in the number of students who ultimately earned the doctorate (National Science Foundation 2006). Four years later, in 1987, Oberlin remained in the fifth position; the next year Oberlin was stunned to fall completely out of the top 10. Beginning in 1988, the U.S. News rankings methodology began to include quantitative measures of student and institutional characteristics that it believed were more objective measures of quality, and consequently peer reputation became a progressively smaller part of the overall ranking. Oberlin did not score at the top of these new measures, and its ranking suffered. By the mid-1990s, Oberlin was in
Despite ongoing debates about their uses and validity, university rankings are a popular means to compare institutions within a country and around the world. Anchoring theory suggests that these rankings may influence assessments of institutional reputation, and this effect may be particularly strong when a new rankings system is introduced. We test this possibility by examining data from the first 3 years of the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) world university rankings. Consistent with an anchoring hypothesis, the initial THES rankings influenced peer assessments of reputation in subsequent surveys, but second-year rankings were not related to changes in reputation in the third year. Furthermore, as expected, early peer assessment ratings were not associated with changes in future rankings. These findings provide strong evidence for an anchoring effect on assessments of institutional reputation. We discuss the usefulness of these peer assessments, along with ways in which reputational surveys can be improved.
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