The U.S. News and World Report’s latest annual ranking of the country’s best colleges has listed Portland State as “unranked.”
David Santen, a senior writer for university communications, explained that PSU’s status as “unranked” simply means that the university has a rating, but is in a lower tier than the schools that receive a numerical rank.
The 2012 U.S. News and World Report rankings collected statistical data from over 1,600 academic institutions.
The ranking system divides schools into groups according to school mission (national universities or liberal arts colleges) and regional location (North, South, East, West and Midwest). The report then uses several factors for rating a school, each worth a certain percentage of the total score based on its perceived importance by U.S. News researchers.
Some factors include: retention of students, faculty resources, alumni giving, graduation rate performance, financial resources and student selectivity. To rank the schools, the composite score of each institution is weighed against its peers in the same category.
However, according to Kathi Ketcheson, director of the Office of Institutional Research and Planning, 25 percent of a university’s rank is based on the surveyed opinions of administrators at peer institutions. This measure is the source of the majority of criticism directed at the U.S. News Ranking system, because it is a measure in which objectivity can easily be usurped.
Peer administrators surveyed by the report may choose to only assess universities that they know well or have previously worked with. Ketcheson commented that some universities “game the system” by actively marketing their institution to administrative peers in a concerted effort to boost their ranking. This is a tactic that Ketcheson claims PSU has never employed.
PSU has never designed policy simply to better its ranking, according to Ketcheson, and all changes and improvements to the school are made because PSU wants its students to succeed. Ketcheson said that PSU is accountable to its students, the city and its mission, but not to a ranking institution.
Another general criticism of the U.S. News Ranking is that the categories are too broad and that diversity among universities is lost. “[The U.S. News methodology is] probably a good way of throwing a net around the 1,800 or so colleges they are trying to rank, but the fact of the matter is, our campus isn’t going to be a good fit with some of those rankings,” Santen said.
Both Santen and Ketcheson agreed that some of the ranking categories—student selectivity and alumni giving especially—put PSU at a disadvantage because of the school’s non-traditional characteristics.
According to Santen, PSU has no cap on enrollment, meaning that if a prospective student meets the minimum admissions requirements then they are accepted regardless of how many other students have already been admitted. This makes the school seem less selective, and lowers the rating for that category.
The alumni giving factor is also partially responsible for PSU’s lower rank. “[Alumni giving] is going to be a category that favors older universities. We were established in 1946,” Santen said.
While PSU remains unranked in the overall list of national universities, there are other ranking lists in which the school excels.
According to Santen, PSU has done well in the U.S. News Ranking for programs that lead to student success, including the Senior Capstone, First-Year Experience and University Studies programs.
Additionally, PSU’s Graduate School of Business is ranked in the top 100 for part-time MBA programs by U.S. News and World Report.
Kelly Doherty, assistant director of marketing and recruiting for the Graduate School of Business, said that the program is successful because it attracts non-traditional students from all over the world. She said that the program is focused on entrepreneurial leadership, innovation and sustainability, which sets it apart from more traditional business degree programs.
In Doherty’s experience, rank—or program prestige—has been extremely important to prospective students, especially those from foreign countries. In some cases that involved international students, a low rank actually prohibited a student from participating in a program.
She believes that rank should be important to Portland State because it contributes to peoples’ perceptions about the quality of the university’s programs.
PSU conducted a poll several years ago asking people whether a ranking of Portland State by U.S. News and World Report as one of the best colleges that leads to student success would improve their perception of PSU. Of people surveyed, 27 percent said that it would improve their perception slightly, and 34 percent said that it would greatly improve their perception of the school.
This means that collectively, 61 percent of people could be affected by the school’s rank. This makes the U.S. News and World Report, and other ranking systems like it, too powerful to overlook.
“One reason that we don’t completely ignore rankings like U.S. News is that we have found, through public polling and public perception, that people respond to ratings, and it becomes sort of a shorthand for quality, for better or for worse,” Santen said.