Peabloggy

On the USA Today website, there is an interesting article about looking past rankings in college selection and college fit. Apparently, some want to use the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) data for colleges and universities as a ranking tool and advocate for making institutional results of this survey public. NSSE covers a broad scope of student involvement during the college years, and can in turn represent the level of quality that undergraduates might experience.
I found it quite interesting that none of the institutions that comprise the Ivy League have participated in the NSSE in the past. The reasoning given in the article by David Jamieson-Drake from Duke University about his institution not using NSSE was valid: the survey does not, and cannot, accurately measure student engagement at the elite institutions. While Duke is not a member of the traditional Ivy League, it certainly can attract similar students.

I agree that for a small number of elite institutions, the NSSE results hold little or no value in guiding initiatives or attracting quality students. For other institutions, the data would undoubtedly help in these areas. However, I am still skeptical about using NSSE data for rankings, and I am even more skeptical about making the data public.
- Landon Clark

Today, the Education Schools Project released Educating Researchers, a report that “focuses on the need for quality education research and on the preparation of the scholars and researchers who conduct it.”

Part II of the report is entitled “An Excellent Program”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chapter is written entirely about Vanderbilt’s Special Education department. It details the structure, competency requirements, aggregated faculty accomplishments, and other unique facets of the program. It is meant to describe what may be considered the “gold standard” for Ph.D. production.

In light of this report and recent U.S. News rankings, I wonder how much praise a department can get before they need to build a new building just to accommodate the increased mass of people’s heads -

I, for one, am in the market for a new hat to accommodate my swollen pride. Sure, I understood that I would be attending a world-class research institution when I arrived at Vandy in August of 2005, but this is more than I expected. The report focuses mostly on the faculty and on student requirements, but as a student, it’s clear to me that the aspects of the program that are lauded as essential for producing good researchers are actually doing their job…

- Peter Beddow

Previous: If it’s U.S. News…it must be April

At 12:01 this morning, U.S.News & World Report made public the latest rankings for its annual edition of “America’s Best Graduate Schools.” Here’s the rundown:

• Vanderbilt Peabody moved up from No. 5 to No. 3 among graduate schools of education.
• We’re tied with Harvard, which dropped two spots from No. 1 last year. (Insert joke about Harvard being the Vanderbilt of the north here.)
• The new top five are Teachers College (1), Stanford (2), Vanderbilt and Harvard (3), and UCLA (5).
• Peabody did well again on the magazine’s specialty rankings:
  • Special Education 1st
  • Administration/Supervision 2nd
  • Education Policy 5th
  • Educational Psychology 9th
  • Elementary Education 9th
  • Higher Education Administration 9th
  • Curriculum/Instruction 10th

A little off the cuff analysis. That top five cluster is pretty tight, with overall scores between 100 and 95. After that, there’s quite a drop. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, No. 6, has a score of 90. Northwestern, No. 7, scored 85, and the descent continues from there. Take away message: both quantitative and qualitative differences are rather pronounced once you get out of the top five.

Special education’s No. 1 ranking is its fifth in a row. Message: if you’re interested in special education, come here. We’re the best.

Education Policy and Higher Education Administration both went up one spot (so did Ed Psych). If I had to speculate–and I am–I’d guess that we’re continuing to benefit from publicity about the way we re-engineered our Ed.D. to make it relevant to practitioners and distinguish it from the more scholarly Ph.D. We’re probably gaining recognition, too, for the two national centers (school choice and performance incentives) we’ve inaugurated with large federal grants in the last three years. Someone should chisel “Reform Starts Here” over the doors to Payne Hall.

In the interest of full-disclosure, Elementary Education and Curriculum/Instruction both dropped three. I don’t have an explanation, but I’d be interested to learn one. I’m inclined to think that like a lot of the top schools, we get hurt a little by the apparent disconnect between emphases on research and practice. (Aside: we’re working on that. Stay tuned.) Message: we’re still in the top ten. Talk with our people and decide for yourself.

Educational Psychology is kind of an interesting case. We’ve been ranked highly in that specialty for years, despite the fact that we’ve lacked a formal degree program. Rather, we’ve got educational psychologists scattered throughout our departments and our knowledge in the area informs many different programs. This year, however, Professor Steve Elliott has developed a new Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Educational Psychology. He’s looking for candidates.

There are a few other bright spots in the data:

• Our combined GRE for doctoral students is 1340. This was the second highest among the top ten.
• Our acceptance rate for doctoral students was only 10.3 percent. That’s remarkably low. We’re the second most selective among all top 50 schools.
• We also had the third lowest student-to-faculty ratio in the top ten.

Combined message: we take the smartest people, and we mentor them very closely.

Having flacked the numbers, it’s probably time to add the usual qualifiers: no ratings system is perfect, the numbers game misses many qualitative differences, etc. These qualifiers are true, and important. As someone who works in higher ed communications, frankly, I’ve got mixed emotions about rankings.

So let me close with a question: current students, prospective students–how important were/are the rankings to you? And why? Leave a comment.

–Kurt Brobeck