The annual U.S. News & World Report ranking of America’s Best Colleges is hard to ignore. Though some are trying to. We note that neither the Seattle Times nor SeattlePI.com covered the rankings release locally, going with an Associated Press story instead.
We’ve written in this space that such rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. A local high school student recently urged her peers to do their own rankings. Elsewhere there’s much more disdain. Lynn O’Shaughnessy calls them “a joke” on her College Solution blog for CBS Moneywatch. The Oregonian quotes Reed College President Colin Diver as dismissing the rankings as based on “ignorance, partial knowledge and a gossip-mill mentality”—this despite the fact the magazine rates Reed as one of the “up-and-coming” liberal arts colleges. Reed has refused to participate in the process for years, and more colleges follow that tack every year.
We like Whitworth University President Bill Robinson’s take on the rankings: “It’s great that our efforts are recognized every year by U.S. News,” Robinson says, “but we try not to make too much of the rankings and don’t recommend that prospective students do either. There are far more important things that determine whether Whitworth or another school is the best fit for a particular student.”
Like Robinson, we think that fit is most important. But we’re pleased to see five of the members of Independent Colleges of Washington ranked in the top 16 best universities that grant both undergraduate and master’s degrees in the west, and five among the top 10 “best values” in the same category.
Both of our members that are classified as liberal arts colleges are rated in the top tier in that category.
Here’s what Gonzaga University and Whitworth University have to say about the rankings.
Meanwhile, prospective students can use tools such as NAICU’s U-CAN (University and College Accountability Network) to compare colleges based on hard, apples-to-apples data. The information included in the system was selected because students and families said it was what’s really important to them.
