Success in New Rankings Reflects Positive Trend
By Ashley Langsdorf
Staff Writer

There is hardly a person at Pomona who has not heard of the College’s fourth place ranking by U.S. News & World Report, and its position as second happiest school in the nation at least a dozen times.

“We’re very happy to be where we are,” said Bruce Poch, Dean of Admissions, “to be able to slap down the magazine and say we’re top four gives us a certain nod to credibility. Sometimes it is helpful to kids whose parents are obsessing about big universities and big name schools to see this impressive number.”

With admirable numbers, Pomona has certainly made a name for itself on several college lists. Dean of Students Ann Quinley agrees. “The positive part of the U.S. News & World Report has been for colleges out of the liberal arts streams—out of the liberal arts colleges in the East. It’s given us visibility,” she said. “People see us on the list and wonder, ‘What is Pomona?’ They’ll explore colleges they may never have heard of otherwise.”

Publications such as the U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review’s The Best 351 Colleges use a variety of methods to evaluate and rank the nation’s colleges and universities. The U.S. News & World Report uses a variety of information to arrive at a college’s ranking, from graduation rate and student retention to alumni giving and selectivity. The Princeton Review uses student responses to gauge the excellence (as well as the quality of dorms, food, teaching, and general student happiness) of many educational institutions.

Many people are hesitant about the validity of the Princeton Review’s conclusions, including Poch. “Princeton Review has the worst methodology used. They have a website for current students to go to and fill out a survey. I’ve been a little irritated because they encourage me to encourage our students to go to the website. They even wanted me to give out student email addresses. I won’t do that,” said Poch.

Recently, two other publications have joined the game of college ranking: The Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic Monthly.

In an article titled, “Want to go to Harvard Law?” by Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal, hatched a new approach to comparing colleges. According to the article, the newspaper “researched the background of more than 5,000 students starting at more than a dozen top business, law, and medical schools this fall.” The article hoped to reveal which colleges and universities had the highest rates of students at the top graduate schools, implying that the best undergraduate schools sent their students to the top graduate programs.

Pomona was addressed in a section titled “Small College, Big Job.” “Then there’s tiny Pomona College in California, which sent a higher proportion of its kids to Harvard Law this year than Columbia or Duke,” wrote Bernstein. The survey set Pomona as #13 in relation to all the other colleges and universities in the country.

“I think it ends up focusing on some of the wrong things. The more important point is one that a lot of people here might make: we all write pages of recommendations and put hours into helping our students prepare and we put an awful lot into trying to give students skills to succeed,” said Poch.

While the Wall Street article uses graduate school numbers to rate undergraduate institutions, the Atlantic Monthly opted to use selectivity rates to rank different schools.

In an article titled, “The Selectivity Illusion,” author Don Peck writes, “The ranking is derived entirely from three variables that college admissions officers commonly say are most indicative of a school’s competitiveness: the school’s admission rate, the SAT scores, and the high school class rank of matriculating freshmen.” In the ranking, Pomona was deemed sixteenth best in the nation.

President David Oxtoby points out that one problem with this ranking system is that it only incorporates selectivity as the recipe for academic merit. “Selectivity [is] not the only criterion for excellence,” he said.

Students at Pomona also find fault with such a simplistic approach.

“It doesn’t seem like selectivity would play any part in the quality of a college’s education. It’s a secondary marker of the college’s academic quality,” said Sylvan Long ’07.

Ultimately, several Pomona administrators agree that these college rankings are not holistic enough to represent a college accurately. “These surveys express their values and not ours. We do a lot of our own internal exploration of those issues particular to Pomona. We’re asking Pomona-centric questions so we can find out where we need to improve,” said Poch.

Oxtoby shares Poch’s view adding, “It is not possible to rank schools in strict order because one might be better in one area, and another in a different area. It is important that students find the school that is right for them, not just one that is high in the rankings.”

Quinley discounts the rankings completely saying, “I don’t pay any attention to [the ratings]. If there was something we could change that didn’t go against our principles to increase our ranking, we might do it, but we won’t go out of our way to knock our numbers up. We’re pleased with our US News rating. We’re fourth best, but I’d say we’re even ‘first best.’”

Despite the flaws in the ranking methodologies, administrators recognize that people still turn to these guidebooks and publications to see how a certain institution compares to others.

“I think ratings have an effect because it’s hard to see what a school’s education is like unless you visit it. [Comparing rankings] is the easiest way to compare schools. Applying to schools is such a rushed and time-consuming process that you have to cut corners, which means that people look at these ratings without seeing the flaws in them,” said Long.