In high school guidance offices across the country, prospective college students find the thick report titled ‘America’s Best Colleges.’ The 2008 publication by U.S. News and World Report released last week, ranks Syracuse University at its 53rd spot – three spaces lower than 2007.

The drop is ‘not a big change,’ said Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News. The university has alternated between 50th and 52nd for past four years.

‘Generally speaking, it’s a very small change,’ he said. ‘There’s small changes in some of the variables that accounted for the difference, or a school moved ahead of you … and pushed you down.’

The small changes were in admissions data and faculty data, he said, noting it would be too time consuming to determine exactly what caused the three spot deficit this year.

Ranked 83rd is the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, up from last year’s ranking of 85.

U.S. News has published its rankings of colleges annually since 1985. This year, Forbes.com joined the college-ranking arena, because, according to Forbes.com, ‘for too many years, information about the quality of American higher education has been monopolized by one publication.’

Forbes.com has much different rankings, placing SU at 320th, trailing 189th-ranked SUNY-ESF.

Morse, who has worked at U.S. News since 1976, thinks Forbes.com’s rankings are weaker than the ones he works on.

‘Their rankings don’t make any sense,’ he said.

High graduation and freshmen retention rates are two of SU’s greatest strengths compared to other schools, Morse said. Graduation rate performance, the difference between predicted and achieved graduation rate, was another strength Morse pointed out.

SU’s biggest weakness was what Morse called financial resources – not financial aid, he emphasized, but rather how much the university spends on the education of each student.

While the rankings give a snapshot of a school’s strengths and weakness, it is meant to be only a guideline for prospective students, Morse said.

‘The students should not use the rankings as the sole reason to attend a school or not,’ he said. ‘They should only be used as one tool in the student’s deciding to go to a school or not go to a school.’

Dana Schwartz, a freshman to major in psychology, agreed. She found college visits to be more helpful in making her choice.

‘I feel like I visited schools who were ranked higher than what Syracuse was, and they made a bad impression,’ she said.

She and Zach Levandov, an undeclared freshman in the College of Human Ecology, said they thought SU’s ranking should be higher.

‘The rankings are just numbers,’ Levandov said.

The three-point drop for SU is nothing to worry about, Morse said.

‘Your school has bounced around the same level for a number of years, so it’s ranking is pretty stable,’ he said.

If it continues to go down little by little in the future, Morse said there could be cause for alarm, but for now he sees no downward trend over the past five years.

The process for rankings each year starts in January. The eight-month process lasts until August, while U.S. News conducts surveys to collect data from schools, including quantitative data like graduation rate and freshmen admissions data, Morse said.

College administrators also complete reputation surveys, a method that raised controversy in May 2007 when college presidents across the country signed a letter criticizing the report and refusing to complete surveys of their peers.

At the end of the process, Morse compares the data from all of the schools among their peer institutions. SU, for example, is compared only to other research and doctoral granting universities.

‘People need to understand: Are the rankings accurate?’ he said. ‘They’re accurate in the sense that they’re measuring the relative merits of the schools using the set of variables and the weights that we’ve chosen.’

Cristina Luiggi, a graduate student at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, questioned the ranking system.

‘I’m skeptical about it,’ she said. ‘You have your top schools that are great at everything, I guess, but then other schools have their really good department, and so the ranking – the whole general ranking thing – what does that even mean?’

Susan E. Donovan, SU dean of admissions, is on vacation and unavailable for comment.

rsbalton@syr.edu

Published on September 2, 2008 at 12:00 pm