That’s not a typo: Forbes ranks USC 300th in ratings

USC administrators like to tout the school’s rapid ascent up the U.S. News and World Report rankings — “rising farther and faster,” one TV spot raves. But a new list released by Forbes magazine earlier this month could spell trouble for USC’s public relations machine.
The rankings place USC in the 300th spot — a far cry from its steady position at 27 on the U.S. News and World Report list
released Friday.
The rankings are not without controversy.  The non-profit bases 50 percent of a school’s total score on standard college ranking fodder such as the number of nationally competitive awards won by students and faculty, the institution’s four-year graduation rate and the average debt of students upon graduation.
 The organization also bases 25 percent of a school’s score on percentage of alumni found in “Who’s Who in America,” an annual ranking of prominent and noteworthy Americans. The last 25 percent uses the millions of student reviews logged at RateMyProfessor.com as a way to evaluate professors.
The Forbes top 10 starts off
familiarly, with Princeton, Caltech and Harvard coming in Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Swarthmore College is fourth on the list, followed by Williams, the United States Military Academy, Amherst, Wellesley, Yale and Columbia.
USC rival Stanford is ranked 23rd, but UCLA checked in at 111th. Notre Dame was 77th.
Mark Pavelchak, academic integration officer at the Office of the Provost, said most USC administrators aren’t taking the Forbes rankings seriously.
“My take and the take of most of the administrators is that the Forbes ranking have no validity,” he said. “The measures they use, such as RateMyProfessor.com, to rank faculty quality do not make sense. There are certain rankings like this one where the people doing the rankings have a political agenda.”
USC wasn’t the only large university to score poorly. New York University, which ranks 33rd on the U.S. News list, placed 324th on the Forbes rankings. Another large school, the University of Wisconsin, Madison ranked 335th.
“The fact that we are very similar to NYU shows that the Forbes rankings do not take into account what it means to be a large private university,” Pavelchak said. “You cannot drop 300 places from one ranking to another without a problem with methodology.”
The organization responsible for the rankings is the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. According to their website, the CCAP is “dedicated to research on the issues of rising costs and stagnant efficiency in higher education.”
CCAP director Richard Vedder also keeps a running blog where he weighs in on such topics as rising community college costs.
Jim Coleman, a research associate at CCAP, said USC ranks above average relative to other institutions on the Who’s Who measure as well as the number of nationally competitive awards won by students and faculty. USC, however, scores below average when it comes to student debt at graduation, four-year graduation rate and student evaluations of professors.
“We want to put the idea out there that the way U.S. News and World Report ranks colleges is not the only way,” Coleman said. “As a non-profit we want to help students.”
Although the U.S. News rankings are by far the most popular, the publication has also faced criticism lately. Their ranking system asks university presidents to evaluate schools of similar stature on a scale of one to five, and use those results as a quarter of a school’s score.
This is a point of contention for some schools that feel it gives preference to institutions with long standing reputations. The number of colleges participating in the survey has been dropping steadily, slipping below 50 percent for the first time this year.
Much of the backlash is due to an open letter circulated by the Education Conservancy, an industry watchdog. Sixty-six college presidents signed the letter, which urges schools not to fill out the peer
assessment and not to use rankings in their promotional materials.
Pavelchak pointed to a sub-
category of the U.S. News rankings that lists colleges that have shown the most improvement. On that list USC ranks third behind George Mason University and Clemson University.
“The reason why we work so hard to be competitive in the U.S. News rankings is because there is a grain of truth to their list,” Pavelchak said. “We care about the fact that our improvement shows we are doing better things for the students and our objective is to keep doing better things in the future.”
Though many students enjoy seeing USC ranked among the best schools in the nation, they realize the inherent difficulty in ranking the assortment of colleges the United States has to offer. Back when he was applying to schools, Roy Manukyan, a sophomore majoring in business administration with an emphasis in cinema-television, said “I did look at rankings, but they didn’t make a difference to me at all.”
Jensen Higley, a freshman majoring in theatre, echoed Manukyan’s sentiments. “If USC was 300th it wouldn’t make a difference to me. I still want to be here.”

Comments

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above: