By Ellen Chaffee 

    Saturday’s Fargo Forum newspaper had a nice article about the U.S. News & World Report college rankings that just came out. It bears repeating here, but in our own words. The rankings are intended to help people select a college to attend based on measures of quality.
    This is the tenth straight year that Valley City State University has been named one of the top baccalaureate colleges in the Midwest. It is also the year when persistent rumblings and complaints about the rankings among college presidents erupted into a formal protest movement. Institutions that joined the movement agreed not to participate in the data collection process on which the rankings are based. After much publicity, only 62 presidents signed up – over 3,500 were eligible.
    The primary complaint among presidents is the use of reputational data. Each year, all college presidents get a ballot from U.S. News that lists all of the institutions in their own peer group. Presidents are asked to rate the quality of those with which they are familiar. The resulting score counts for one-fourth of the points in the ranking system.
    I agree that the peer ranking system is crazy. Most of us know very little about the others, and what we know is usually based heavily on having met the president or receiving the institution’s alumni magazine. Whether one president finds another one impressive is not a key factor when a student selects an institution. To that extent, I agree with presidents who object to the system.
    However, it takes eleven measures to create the rank, and the other ten measures do make sense – class size, faculty ratio, faculty qualifications, retention rates, graduation rates, and alumni giving, for example. Alumni giving is an indicator of satisfaction with their personal experience at the university and their on-going confidence in it. Thus, the other indicators measure something that is relevant when deciding on a college.
    Some colleges systematically try to change their results on the indicators so that they will have a higher rank. I occasionally receive letters or publications from other presidents that are clearly designed to influence my rating for that institution when survey time comes around again. It doesn’t work.
    As I said in the Forum story, I am much more proud of many other elements of Valley City State University, but those other elements take more time and effort to communicate. The stature and visibility we gain from the rankings validate our credibility and bring us to the favorable attention of people who never heard of us before. But it is still our outstanding faculty, staff, and community that bring students here.
    One of them was Dr. Bonnie Alexander, associate professor of biology. She died Saturday after a brief, courageous battle with cancer. Her last major professional activity was escorting a group of students on a science trip to Australia earlier this summer. It was yet another example of her going the extra mile. We will miss her, and we offer our heartfelt condolences to her family and friends.