A new approach for U.S. News?

With plans to adjust the information it collects for its annual ranking of colleges, the U.S. News and World Report might be seeking to make its annual rankings more rounded.

The magazine announced plans last week to make its rankings more qualitative by collecting information from high-school guidance counselors for the first time. But, U.S. News has yet to decide how the additional input will factor into its ranking system.

Last year, Penn ranked fifth on the national colleges listing.

The yearly surveys are often a source of much debate because it is questionable whether the criteria used to measure the schools actually speak to the overall quality of a college, David Hawkins, policy director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said.

To combat that image, the magazine decided this year to send surveys to counselors at the 1,600 schools ranked in the magazine's "America's Best High Schools" ranking.

Criticism has also come from college presidents, who are surveyed every year to peer review schools. Several presidents - including those at Skidmore, Muhlenberg and Dickinson- have also pledged to withhold information from the rankings, saying the ratings are not as statistically sound as they appear.

This year, presidents were also asked additional questions about up-and-coming colleges and about what they would like to see encompassed in the magazine's ranking methodology.

However, U.S. News has not decided how to utilize the new data, and that leaves some doubtful of the change's effects.

"I think many of our counselors have reacted with a bit of skepticism about it," Hawkins said.

"By and large what we've heard from our counselors is they really feel like their effort to guide students is not entirely well served by feeding information into this method," he added.

The counselors instead rely on their "intimate knowledge" of the schools to guide students toward the right college, he said

"I really think that if you talk to any college counselors worth anything they don't use them at all," Barry Baker, a counselor at the California Academy of Math and Science in Carson, California, said

Most say a significant shift in the universities considered "top tier" by the magazine is doubtful.

"I think the institutions that have been historically in the top 10, 15, 20 have been terrific universities, so I don't think that things will shift dramatically," Joann Mitchell, Penn's vice president of institutional affairs, said.

Penn President Amy Gutmann said there were "many other qualitative and quantitative" ways to judge a school, and that the U.S. News is "not the most fine-tuned and it certainly is not the most definitive."

Mitchell said "none of [the rankings] are perfect" but that they do give students and parents a way to broadly compare schools.

"There's a lot of information for students to take in, and I hope that they will look at it for what it is: one tool among many," she said.

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