COLUMN: Crunching numbers

From Lisa Levenson's "First Person," Fall '96 From Lisa Levenson's "First Person," Fall '96Here's a look at what reallyFrom Lisa Levenson's "First Person," Fall '96Here's a look at what reallygos into the production of aFrom Lisa Levenson's "First Person," Fall '96Here's a look at what reallygos into the production of acollege guide, from someoneFrom Lisa Levenson's "First Person," Fall '96Here's a look at what reallygos into the production of acollege guide, from someonewho's been there three times From Lisa Levenson's "First Person," Fall '96Here's a look at what reallygos into the production of acollege guide, from someonewho's been there three times Let me get this straight: The Class of 2000 is the University's most talented ever; Penn President Judith Rodin has everyone from President Clinton to Mayor Rendell falling over their feet to bask in her glow; and plans for the Perelman Quadrangle student center and the new, Barnes & Noble-managed Book Store are on track (according to administrators). Yet the University has managed to drop two places in the all-important annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. That's right, drop two places. What? You don't understand? Allow me to explain. I spent the summer as an intern at a New York-based magazine that happens to publish a college section, on which I worked extensively. I've also worked as a freelance writer for a big-name college guidebook for the past two years. By virtue of my experience, you could call me a guru of guides. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my association with these fine publications, it's simply this: college ratings and rankings are a crock. See, most college guides brag about their comprehensiveness, their accuracy and their insider knowledge of all the schools they profile. They preach these benefits to bewildered pre-frosh, whose already-cash-strapped parents shell out a quite a sum for the sage advice these books supposedly contain. But the guides don't get their raw information -- all 150,000 pieces of it, as one book notes -- by sending reporters to each and every included campus. (Who really wants to visit the University of Southern Mississippi, anyway?) Instead, each magazine or book publisher typically sends out a survey asking for a school's vital statistics, including name, address, SAT score ranges, number of faculty members who teach freshmen, cost of tuition, fees room and board, among others. Some books contract with an outside firm for collection and analysis of this voluminous amount of data. The surveys may be anywhere from four to more than 10 pages in length (trust me, I've seen them), and there's no agreement about the order in which questions are asked -- or even if all publications ask the same questions. A reporter calling about Money magazine's Question 4 could accidentally get the answer to Question 4 of the U.S. News survey -- and never know the difference. The recent entry of Time and Newsweek into the world of college guides further complicates the picture. Additionally, the questionnaires are filled with blanks too tiny to hold the requested information, and often worded so ambiguously that allegations of "fudging the stats" could really stem from honest mistakes. Anyway, the numbers and percentages meticulously entered into these surveys are fed into a computer program of some type, which digests them repeatedly into bizarre permutations and formulas, all the while humming and whirring and threatening to shut down from information overload. In the end, the machine spits out a neat set of rankings that match a scientifically significant scatter plot -- but reveal absolutely nothing about what any given individual student will think of a college. Pretty amazing, huh? A few short months or years ago, you, too believed the hype. This isn't to say college guides are completely worthless. Many guides provide comprehensive, one-stop college shopping for students who don't know where to start. Most are accurate, thanks to the tireless efforts of fact-checkers who must reconfirm selected survey data before the text goes to press. And nearly all provide an insider's view of some type, whether from the president's office or the offices of the sponsoring student organization. However, when the topic of a guide is the best of the best, when a book attempts to differentiate between the most elite of America's elite schools, most are separated by nothing more than a few tenths of a point. If you aren't planning to major in some exotic discipline, with so few experts that your college choice hinges on where these scholars are, then it shouldn't matter whether your college rates a 99.4 or a 96.7 or even a 95.2, Penn's current value. I seriously doubt we would want any prospective freshman so shallow as to cross Penn off of his college choice list because the University is no longer Number 11. Sure, it would be nice to be a Top 10 school in academics and quality of life, since no Quakers will ever rank that high on a coaches' poll. But let's keep this in perspective. Being 13th in the nation isn't so bad. After all, we still ranked higher than Cornell.