Fairly recently the U.S. News and World Report published its annual rankings of American colleges and universities. Within days the New York Times (Sept. 19, 2022, “U.S. News College Rankings Live On, Despite Criticisms”) published its annual critique of that annual report. I have not seen a copy of the U.S. News and World Report in many years, if indeed it is still even published as an old-fashioned news magazine, a genre long since rendered anachronistic by cyberism. But like most college professors, and certainly all college administrators, I am quite aware that, in the words of the Times article, the magazine’s rankings “continue to be a dominant reference guide for families evaluating colleges…”
Somewhat to your blogger’s embarrassment, his own institution, Princeton, currently holds the USNWR Numero Uno rating. I do take pride in the university from which I hold advanced degrees and where I taught for many decadees. But is Princeton really the best college in America? Sure. It’s right there in so many words in our barely musical alma mater: “It’s the best old place of all.” Strangely you can find very similar phrases in other college songs, maybe most of them. But uneasy is the head that wears the crown. This year’s listings fluttered the dovecotes by demoting Columbia University from Number Two to Number Seventeen. If the claim to be able to identify the best college in America is merely fantastic, the claim to identify the seventeenth-best is wholly preposterous.
There are of course variations in quality among institutions of higher learning, and hence sensible and defensible distinctions to be made among them. But the USNWR ranked list is a gimmick, not a reliable data sheet. The vast majority of college administrators surely realize that. Most college presidents will even say that. But then the whole lot of them sweat blood for the week before the rankings appear. That is because college trustees, many, many parents, some unsophisticated high-school counsellors, affluent applicants on foreign strands, and indeed the general public are in its thrall. I suppose these same people must spend a certain amount of time on the Internet engaging meaningless lists of “Ten Hollywood Starlets Who Used to Own Poodles,” or “The Twelve Greatest Rutabaga Dishes of All Time.” My remarks imply no denial of reasonably objective standards or the qualitative comparisons among institutions. But we might be a little clearer about what we think we are comparing.
What is the best fish in the sea? It’s got to be the Norwegian salmon, right? And what’s the best tree in the forest? That would be the white oak, of course. There’s got to be general agreement about that, but now comes the hard part. Rank in order of superiority, the Norwegian salmon, the white oak, and Calacatta marble.
In order to offer a convincing list of top colleges, it is necessary to agree upon some generally applicable criteria. There are fewer of these than one might think. It is probable that American higher education remains the envy of the world. If so, that high regard reflects the appreciation of its extraordinary diversity—a concept sometimes overhyped when talking about student body composition but undervalued in terms of the shape of higher education as a whole. The American model is anything but unitary, featuring excellent institutions of many different kinds.
Many years ago I served on a commission engaged by the State of Florida to assess and report on the general state of higher education there. It was among the more illuminating assignments I ever had. A week-long glimpse is not a deep study, but you can learn a lot. Florida is a highly populous state with lots of money inequably distributed among its population, little of which is seriously taxed for educational purposes. Nonetheless it has a highly enrolled range of state colleges and universities, and several reputable smaller liberal arts colleges. Their premier institution, the University of Florida at Gainesville, now twenty-ninth on the USNWR “national” list, has several strong departments. That it is not in the league with some of the great midwestern schools has to do with sectional differences between north and south in the mid-nineteenth century. The first sitting of the Michigan State Assembly (1837) established a university. At the first sitting of the Arkansas legislature (1836) the Speaker stepped down from the podium to attack an opponent with a Bowie knife. Autres pays, autres moeurs. There is nothing in the Sunshine State approaching a great private institution like Stanford, Duke, or those of the Ivies. Yet Florida has one of the most extraordinary educational institutions in the country: the Dade (Miami) Community College. This huge enterprise enrolls more than a hundred thousand students, many of them from modest backgrounds--immigrants, the children of immigrants, and other aspirational and practically focused learners, young and not so young. It is not MIT, Cornell, or Reed; but it has clarity concerning its own crucial institutional mission. You can study practically anything at DCC, but one overarching strong component is a focus on the skills of literacy and mathematics frequently short-changed by our more mediocre high schools. I had the sense of an extraordinary institution that knew what it was trying to do and by and large does it. I would have to call it a “great” institution even if nobody from Choate has ever applied to it.
There is no longer a broad humanistic agreement that the purpose of higher education is to broaden a student’s intellectual, cultural, and ethical horizons to enhance personal character and enable effective social engagement and service. The purpose is to be able to get a good job. There is nothing contemptible about this realization. Our economic world has been in rapid change for at least a generation. Our high schools produce fewer and fewer young people prepared to enter careers offering entry to even that modest middle-class life that was once the reasonable aspiration of all socially stable, family-centered people willing to work diligently and productively. But the educational paths to such goals are now perhaps more varied than ever in the past. Among professionals in higher education, “diversity” is now spoken of as a terminal good. Without interrogating that assumption, I would hope it could be extended to embrace the remarkable and remarkably positive diversity of our American institutions of higher education. That diversity does invite qualitative evaluation, but not from a single list of supposed “top colleges”. Before you can responsibly say that an institution is more or less “good,” you need to know what it thinks its mission is, whether that mission has genuine value for individuals and society, and how well and faithfully it seems to be fulfilling it. Very fortunately we still have a sizable number of very different “top colleges.”
