Rankings like those of U.S. News and World Report only confuse the college search process, a new Department of Education report says.
The report, authored by chairman for the Commission on the Future of Higher Education Charles Miller, maintains that a more user-friendly approach to assessing colleges is needed. Released late last month, it calls for more transparent information about colleges and universities, to be provided by the Department of Education through a search engine.
The Web site would include a proposed "democratizing" ranking system, which could rank schools for individual users based on their priorities.
The commission states that the paper is not an official recommendation but intends to call attention to issues involved.
Bob Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, agreed with Miller that many people fall back on the rankings and said they "have become something that the public understands and a benchmark to measure schools against each other."
However, Morse called Miller uninformed in his criticism of U.S. News and said that the rankings' popularity stems from its transparency as well as the high consideration it receives from colleges and universities themselves.
Mike Bowler, a spokesman for the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, called the U.S. News ranking a "glamour contest" but said that it has also been employing more irrefutable data over time.
This goal of transparency can be achieved if companies providing higher-education information abandon the "subjective rankings by college officials of themselves and others," Bowler said. "In other words, the less it's a glamour contest and the more it's objective."
But Lisa Beebe, college counselor for the Foshay Learning Center school in Los Angeles, said her students do not typically include such comparative rankings in college searches and rely primarily on the school's individual Web sites.
She agreed with Miller that students could use a central Web site for college information and said that the College Board Web site now serves this purpose for her students.
Miller's paper also advocates for the improvement of the Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Education Statistics' Web site, which provides federal government data. Though the site was recently improved, Miller wrote in the report that it needs more work.
Morse and Beebe agreed that the site is useful, but students remain largely oblivious to its existence.
"The government site is invisible to the public ... where our site is very highly visible," Morse said.
Proposed innovations would not compete with U.S. News, Morse said.
Morse said that he expects that Miller's call for a consumer-friendly site comparing schools will evolve into an official recommendation, but that any action responding to Miller's proposal will be drawn out over several years.
Beebe said heightened awareness of useful sites among both students and guidance counselors would best serve students.
Students "don't have a lot of practice in analysis in high school," she said. "It's almost just a habit. I don't think you need to change the resource; just raise the level of awareness."
