In response to rising public criticism of the methodology of numerical rankings of colleges in the annual guide published by U.S. News & World Report, the presidents of several leading universities, including Cornell, have declined to respond to portions of the magazine's annual survey that rely on subjective judgments of other institutions.
Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and Stanford University President Gerhard Casper are among several presidents whose campuses submitted objective data to the magazine but withheld submitting their "reputational surveys." The colleges are conducting dialogue with U.S. News editors to urge them to refine the methodology used in compiling the rankings and recommending that they abandon numerical rankings in favor of another style that would recognize the wide diversity of institutions. Both Stanford and Cornell will post objective data on their Web sites.
Student groups critical of the U.S. News rankings have formed on a number of campuses as well, including Stanford, Cornell, The University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Colgate, Rice and the University of Pennsylvania, among others.
While recognizing the need for prospective students to have access to information about campuses, critics of the U.S. News annual guide object to the manner in which statistical data is used to give individual campuses a numerical ranking, from 1 to 299 for national universities; Cornell was ranked 14th in the survey in 1996. Included in the statistical measurements are the results of "reputational surveys" that are sent to college presidents and deans of admissions and academic affairs, who are asked to give their opinions of other campuses.
In a strongly worded letter to Mel Elfin, executive editor of America's Best Colleges, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings wrote, "...such surveys give a remarkably false appearance of precision....[V]ery little judgment can be brought to bear upon a survey of the large number of colleges and universities you list. Trying to make distinctions in undergraduate academic quality across such a broad range of institutions is exceedingly difficult, even for those who take the time to study those institutions carefully. Judgments about reputation are formed on the basis of many criteria, and in order to be informed, they should include far more than a cursory glance at a few objective data. Yet most of us have no time for such scrutiny, and the so-called 'judgments' are inevitably superficial, hence potentially misconceived and misleading."
Rawlings added that "these institutions have very different sizes, missions and student compositions. To compare Biola University with Johns Hopkins University is, to put it mildly, vacuous. I simply do not believe that your readers are well served by such comparisons."