College and University Rankings on the Web

We're #1! Or #5 or maybe #46. People's confidence in college and university rankings always seems to be in direct correlation with how high their favorite institutions place. The College and University Rankings Web site (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankings.htm) from the Education and Social Science Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign not only lists and links to an extensive assortment of rankings, but also helps to put ranking systems into perspective.

A clickable menu on the left side of every page links to rankings on the World Wide Web covering undergraduate, graduate, business, law, and international (non-U.S.) programs. The U.S. News & World Report's ".edu The Rankings" Web site, Money Magazine's "College Guide Value Rankings" and the National Research Council's "Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States" are there, along with Black Enterprise's "Top 50 Colleges for African Americans" and Mother Jones's "Top 10 Activist Schools." Print resources also are indicated, including the popular Gourman Reports and Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. And there's a bibliography of articles providing background information on how to evaluateŅand why you should be skepticalŅabout rankings.

Perhaps the most enlightening section of the Web site is entitled "Rankings Caution and Controversy," which has links to numerous articles challenging school rankings, including a 1997 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Changes in Annual College Guides Fail to Quell Criticisms on Their Validity," and the College Board's discussion of "Rankings & Ratings" in its online journal Enrollment Management Review. As a countermeasure to charges that many ranking systems don't adequately explain their criteria, U.S. News & World Report's Web site now includes a series of pages about "How We Rank/Methodology," "Criteria & Weights," "Category Definitions" and "How We Collect Data: the Common Data Set."

The rankings and the debate about their validity and usefulness are likely to be with us for a long time. The UI-UC Web site, which is updated frequently, is certainly one of the best places on the Internet to access current rankings information and to help us understand what all the fuss is about.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.