College rankings unfair

In retrospect, you know you made the right choice. But when you were applying for college, IU might not have been your first pick. Looking back, it seems hard to believe you almost gave up the unique combination of award-winning academic programs, the beauty of the solarium at dawn and the diversity of Bloomington culture. But don’t worry about it. No one holds it against you. Between the Princeton Review, U.S. News and World Report and the 45 pounds of junk mail that college recruiters sent to your house, one imagined the choice would be easy. But the sheer volume of information really just confuses the whole process.\nThe problem is only compounded by the impossibly subjective statistics and a ranking scale that is inherently disadvantageous toward public universities. Brian Kelly, executive director of U.S. News, said public institutions are failing compared to private ones, citing a consistent drop in their rank in his magazine. There’s no question that state governments are skimping on their duty to provide adequate funding for their students, but a closer examination of the statistics shows how deceptive they really are.\nIt should go without saying that institutions like Harvard and Princeton will always be considered stronger and more prestigious than Big Ten schools primarily because, for example, tuition rates exceeding $30,000 a year allow a university to do some pretty amazing things. Because of this difference, comparing public and private universities seems like an impossible task. That’s to say nothing of the mission statements from state schools. \nIn spite of IU’s plan to downsize the undergraduate body to make room for graduate programs and research facilities, IU exists to serve the public with the best education for the greatest number of people. Large public universities like IU have the obligation to accommodate less economically-privileged students, which translates to higher six-year graduation rates and lower overall graduation rates. Similarly, public institutions cater to the widest range of applicants because they have much higher acceptance rates. Along the same lines, IU’s size prevents competitive student-teacher ratios and exceedingly large endowments from artificially inflating our rank. \nConsidering how influential these rankings are in an applicant’s decision – not to mention the opinion of potential employers – the massive discrepancies should be cause for concern. Private universities that benefit from the tilted ranking systems have little desire to change them, and since it seems unlikely that an organization with fewer biases than U.S. News or The Princeton Review will supplant current college ranking systems, the public universities should be spearheading the effort to equalize the process.\nCountless surveys have shown that cost is one of the most important factors in determining which college a student will attend. And though Kelly is considering adding that statistic to the equation, it only makes sense for public universities to conduct peer reviews of their respective facilities so they can differentiate themselves from private colleges and circumvent the highly biased measurements.