By DEENA GREENBERG
The Daily Pennsylvanian
Penn may have dropped to No. 7 in August's U.S. News and World Report rankings, but it barely made the top 40 in another publication.
Washington Monthly, a left-wing publication that discusses politics and current events, ranked Penn at number 30. U.S. News heavy-hitter MIT came in at number one, but Pennsylvania State University - which doesn't even make the top 30 in U.S. News - is ranked at three.
While the U.S. News rankings are often taken as authoritative, in reality they have a crowded field of competitors, some using substantially different formulas and giving pictures of higher education that are not always flattering to "elite" schools like Penn.
The Washington Monthly rankings, for example, assesses schools based on how much they benefit the country. Its three categories, each given equal weight, are community service, research and social mobility.
Avi Zenilman, a researcher for the magazine, said that the rankings analyze how much social mobility the school offers and how its graduates go on to improve the country.
"It looks at schools not from a consumer perspective, but from a policy perspective," he said.
However, experts still argue that such hierarchal rankings are inadequate. As Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology pushed ahead of Penn in US News' top university ranks, many experts voiced the need for an alternative evaluation system.
Avrinda Kelly, senior editor of 361 Best Colleges by the Princeton Review, said that rankings must incorporate student opinion.
"From our perspective, any ranking list that doesn't factor in student opinion is problematic," she said.
Kelly said that Princeton Review doesn't rank in a hierarchical order. Of the 60 categories, all but two - best academics and toughest to get into - are based on student opinion.
"From the Princeton Review's perspective, we don't find the [hierarchical] rankings of schools that U.S. News and World Report does so helpful," she said. Princeton Review "provides the most holistic picture at a particular school. From a student's perspective, as much information as they can get is helpful."
And then there are a slew of people who reject the hierarchical rankings altogether. For smaller schools, they say, rankings sometimes distract potential applicants from a school's attributes.
Rankings do a "disservice to students and a disservice to colleges," according to Edwin Trathen, a vice president at North Country College of Essex and Franklin, a small New York state university. It "disqualifies a school that could be perfect for them."
For example, he pointed out that U.S. News praised Trinity College in Vermont - even after the school had closed the previous spring.
Trathen advocated "word of mouth" as an alternative ranking system.
But many experts say rankings don't even really matter when it comes to deciding where to go to college.
"It's going to be where you get in. Financial component will also play a role. . There is a unique experience in each of the schools," said Eugene Anderson, associate director at the American Council of Education.
And Roland King, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, an advocacy group for private colleges, agreed that rankings are not ultimately very helpful in the college application process.
"What's needed is matching the right student to the right institutions," King said. "That's not something you can get off of rankings."
