Sarah Rothman | The best rankings move: Ditch the system

I suppose it's old news by now that Penn has fallen to No. 7 (from No. 4) in the U.S. News & World Report rankings this fall. What a disappointment! What did we do to deserve this? Increasing class sizes? Disappointing statistics for the Class of '10? And, most importantly, was Amy Gutmann reprimanded?

Apparently not.

Apparently there was no uproar from well-endowed alumni, and the ground did not open up and swallow Amy Gutmann alive. But if three spots down isn't so bad, how far do we need to fall to cause a problem? The answer is that we would have to fall very far for us to feel any effect here at Penn. Consider our age and reputation, consider the amount of research funding we receive, and consider that sex scandals, murder suspects and an upswing in crime have not become an admissions issue for us. I hardly think a fall in the rankings, even a more sizable fall than from No. 4 to No. 7, can shake us.

Then why do we care? Why does any university care about the rankings anymore, and why do we bother participating?

Believe it or not, 5 percent of American schools have refused to participate in the rankings. In particular, in 1994, Reed College in Oregon stopped participating in the rankings entirely. It simply stopped filling out forms or sending in data. As a result, it received an outpouring of support from students, faculty, trustees, alumni and other college and university presidents. Perhaps more importantly, Reed maintained its selective admissions process - in the past 10 years, its number of applicants has increased by 27 percent.

Former Reed President Steven Koblick commented in Reed Magazine in 1997, "The strength of American higher education is its remarkable diversity. Reed is not for everyone. The best college is what's best for the individual student."

True, the U.S. News system does little to address variety in higher education. Although universities and liberal-arts colleges are ranked separately, the same criteria are used. Consider Reed, where a major spring tradition is gathering to watch the seniors turn in their theses, and Penn, where we bite each others hats on Hey Day. How can you justify using the same measuring stick for what are obviously widely different experiences?

Ironically, when Koblick left Reed, he turned the presidency over to someone close to us, former Penn Law School Dean Colin Diver.

In November, Diver wrote for The Atlantic Monthly about why Reed abandoned the rankings in the first place and what life is like now. Diver cited the pleasure of not wasting time on the lengthy paperwork and the lack of motivation to skew statistics.

However, he said the most important plus of quitting the ratings game "is the freedom to pursue our own educational philosophy, not that of some news magazine."

Perhaps the reason a school like Reed can break away from the mold so easily is because it dosen't view higher education as a consumer item. As Koblick once said, "Higher education isn't a commodity like cars or refrigerators."

Imagine the rankings without Penn on the list.

Let's not sell ourselves short, we would certainly make headlines: an Ivy shunning the great U.S. News & World Report rankings!

Sure, we would take a certain amount of heat for it from the alumni, but imagine other schools following suit - imagine unilateral abandonment. The loss of rank would not deplete the earnings of our Wharton School graduates or decrease the number of publications of our researchers. Students would still not only come to Penn, but flock here, for the privilege of studying with our faculty and utilizing the resources that make us unique. And leaving behind the rankings would send a strong message that those are the things we value here at Penn.

At the end of the Atlantic article, Diver contends that many people have expressed to him that only a school as iconoclastic as Reed could bypass the rankings and survive. While this may or may not be true, let's pretend for a moment that it is.

Then why not Penn? Could there be a school more iconoclastic than ours?

Sarah Rothman is a fifth-year Bioengineering Ph.D. candidate and 2002 Engineering alumna from Fayetteville, N.Y. The Sounds of Science appears on Mondays. Her e-mail address is rothman@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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