What Do Rankings Measure? The U.S. News Rankings and Student Experience at Liberal Arts Colleges

Kim, Jeongeun; Shim, Woo Jeong

doi:10.1353/rhe.2019.0025

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…However, they are also, unmistakably, economic entities that engage in a competitive dynamic with other universities seeking to appeal to an overlapping customer base. The prominence of university rankings intensifies that sense of a win-lose showdown among competitors and reinforces the drive by administrators to manage performance (Jeongeun and Shim, 2019;Lynch, 2015). In that regard, the university could be considered "an enterprise just like any other producing a set of commodities" (Aspromourgos, 2012, p. 45).…”

Section: Whose Normalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whose normal is the new normal anyway? A critical leadership appraisal of university administrators in a waning pandemic

Spector

2023

QROM

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PurposeThe purpose is to offer a critique of the process of decision-making by top university administrators and to analyze how their decisions imposed their preferences and expanded administrative control.Design/methodology/approachIn the fall of 2021, the top administrators at Boston-based Northeastern University required that all members of the university community return to fully on-campus face-to-face work. That decision involved a return to what was labeled “normal operations” and followed a year-and-a-half of adjustments to the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on that case example, the analysis then ranges backward and forward in time. Other decisions – by Northeastern University leaders as well as leaders at other schools – are considered as well.FindingsLeaders impose labels on complex contingencies as a way of constructing meaning. No label is objectively true or indisputable. In the hands of individuals who possess hierarchical power and authority, the application of a label such as “new normal” represents an exercise of power. Through an exploration and analysis of the underlying, unspoken, assumptions behind the application of the “new normal” label, the article suggests how the interests of university leaders were being advanced.Research limitations/implicationsBecause of its reliance on labeling, the paper focuses mainly on the words of administrators – at Northeastern University and elsewhere – that are called upon to explain/justify decisions. The multiplicity of interests forwarded by the “new normal” label are explored. No attempt is made – nor would it be possible – to understand what was in the hearts and minds of these administrators.Practical implicationsThe article makes a case that any and all pronouncements of leaders should be understood as assertions of power and statements of interests. The practical impact is to suggest a critical analysis to be applied to all such pronouncements.Social implicationsThe approach taken in this article is situated within post-modernist analysis that critiques dominant narratives, disputes epistemological certainty and ontological objectivity and takes cognizance of coded messages contained in language.Originality/valueEveryone has been through a traumatic period of time with the pandemic. The author has focused on a specific community – university administrators and tenure/tenure track faculty – as a window to help explain how decision-makers shaped their response. The author wants to emphasize the labels imposed by leaders and the assumptions behind the application of those labels.

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Section: Whose Normalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whose normal is the new normal anyway? A critical leadership appraisal of university administrators in a waning pandemic

Spector

2023

QROM

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“…Our analyses echo and update those of earlier scholars in showing that a college's IPEDS graduation rate largely reflects the mix of students who attend that college, plus its level of instructional expenditures. Politicians and higher education administrators who compare unadjusted graduation rates across several colleges could easily be misled into believing that this is a measure of colleges' quality of education (Kim & Shim, 2019), or its relative efficacy in graduating students, when in fact graduation rate variation largely reflects between-and withincollege variation in the composition of their student bodies, due to selection biases stemming from college selectivity and student enrollment patterns. Policies that view a college's graduation rate as a relative measure of college performance or efficacy, for accountability purposes, make a similar attribution error (e.g., Hagood, 2019;Hess et al 2009;Kelchen & Stedrak, 2016;Umbricht et al 2017).…”

Section: Misleading Graduation Ratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bending the Curve: Institutional Factors Associated with Graduation Rates

2023

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For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at U.S. colleges, advocating policies and making investments to improve graduation. We analyze a decade of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for four-year colleges to investigate how much institutions have improved their graduation rates from 2008 through 2018, once controlling for institutional and student body characteristics. We find substantial improvement to graduation rates at public colleges, modest improvement at private not-forprofits, and a decline in graduation at the for-profit sector. We then investigate whether improvements to graduate rates are associated with variation in student-body composition, selectivity, and institutional expenditures, using pooled cross-sectional, Prais-Winsten, and college fixed effect models. We find that most between-college variation in graduation rates over time reflects variation in the composition of a college's student body and in instructional expenditures. Our Bending the Curve metric utilizes the cross-sectional models to calculate predicted graduation rates for each college and determines how much they exceeded or failed to meet expectations. Unadjusted graduation measures, such as IPEDS' rates that fail to adjust for these compositional factors, are poor indicators of institutional effectiveness and can mislead stakeholders who use them as an indicator of college performance.

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“…As shown in Fig. 1, there are several scientometric studies reported in the literature, including those relating to university rankings [2], [3], [6]- [8]. These university rankings generally take into account scientometric parameters such as the numbers of publications and citations, student/faculty ratio, percentage of international students, Nobel and other prizes received, number of highly cited researchers, number of papers, articles published in the Science and Nature journals, the h-index for both researchers and institutions, and web visibility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Contrast Pattern-Based Scientometric Study of the QS World University Ranking

et al. 2020

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Despite the shortcomings and criticisms of world university rankings, such metrics are widely used by students and parents to select institutions and by educational institutions to attract talented students and researchers, as well as funding. This article introduces the first contrast pattern-based scientometric study of world university rankings. Specifically, this study collects a database containing 34 features, which describe the essential research indicators for the top 200 universities in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranking. The use of 18 state-of-the-art classifiers in this database shows that the top 100 universities in the QS World University Rankings are separable from the remaining compared universities, achieving an average accuracy of 71%. Additionally, using a contrast pattern mining algorithm, a set of patterns describing the top 100 universities is extracted based on scientometric features. Additionally, this study proposes an approach for visualizing the extracted patterns to facilitate the decision-makers, such as senior university managers, in formulating and evaluating their research (ranking) strategies.INDEX TERMS University rankings, data mining, scientometrics, contrast patterns.

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What Do Rankings Measure? The U.S. News Rankings and Student Experience at Liberal Arts Colleges

Cited by 6 publications

References 55 publications

Whose normal is the new normal anyway? A critical leadership appraisal of university administrators in a waning pandemic

Whose normal is the new normal anyway? A critical leadership appraisal of university administrators in a waning pandemic

Bending the Curve: Institutional Factors Associated with Graduation Rates

A Contrast Pattern-Based Scientometric Study of the QS World University Ranking

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