New Nursing School Rankings Are Posted

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The US News rankings are not particularly meaningful or useful.

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The US News rankings are not particularly meaningful or useful.

Hi. In which way or ways are the US News rankings not meaningful or useful?

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Oh. I really don't know too much about them other than both of the Nursing Schools I have gone to opens houses at made it a point to announce their Rankings...

Well that and alot of people seem to put alot of weight behind their undergrad rankings.

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Everyone pays attention to the US News rankings because they're pretty much the only nursing school rankings out there, and, of course, schools that are highly ranked like to make a big deal about that. However, the rankings (all of the US News rankings, not just nursing) are based on a few highly arbitrary measures, most of which are completely meaningless to actual nursing students, and, while these rankings seem to be considered "gospel" by the general public, they are v. controversial within academia.

This was first explained to me by faculty in my graduate program when I asked about why, when the school was widely considered within the nursing community to be one of the top programs in the US, it ranked lower in the US News rankings than a number of schools with lesser reputations in the "real world." A quick internet search just now turned up a bunch of sources, and I'm posting a couple links just to show that I'm not talking out of my hat. :) The first article is referring specifically to the law school rankings, but the criticisms made apply across the board. There's plenty of other literature out there if you really want to look.

"There are several problems with the US News evaluation system. One of the most important of these is that US News does not consider many factors, such as the educational benefits of attending a certain school or the quality of its faculty, that are just as important as the ones it does include. There also are problems related to the accuracy of the data US News relies on to measure a factor, intentional and unintentional biases in the subjective assessments of school quality, and the use of variables that may foster inappropriate school practices. For example, survey respondents may rate down some schools in order to make their own school look better and schools may try to raise their score on the "rejection rate" factor by encouraging applications from students who have virtually no chance of being admitted. In addition, the methods US News uses to combine the values on different components (such as LSAT scores and undergraduate grades) into an overall factor score (such as for "student selectivity") does not really result in assigning the components the weight US News says they should carry (and no rationale is provided for its weights). Other concerns relate to whether the persons who respond to the surveys are truly representative of their respective populations and how US News imputed the values for missing data on certain variables.

Statistical analyses of the data that were available to us revealed that virtually all of the differences in the overall ranks among schools could be explained by the combination of two of the US News factors. These factors are student selectivity (which is driven by the school's median LSAT score) and academic reputation. The other ten factors are superfluous. However, because the US News ranking system inflates small differences in quality among schools, the addition of other factors (and/or slightly changing their weights) could shift a school from the bottom of one broad category of overall quality to the top of another (such as from the second to the third tier). Unfortunately, because of problems with all the factors in the US News system, these changes could just as easily decrease as increase the validity of the overall rankings."

http://www.aals.org/reports/validity.html

"The news magazine U.S. News & World Report has long been the target of criticism for its annual ranking of colleges and universities. In 1996, Stanford University President Gerhard Casper kicked off a wave of controversy over the U.S. News rankings with his letter to James Fallows, the magazine's editor [9]. Casper followed this up with "An Alternative to the U.S. News and World Report College Survey," a press release from Stanford University [10].

The online publication Slate ran a story in August of 1999 questioning U.S. News' motives and methods. In an article titled "Cooking the school books: How U.S. News cheats in picking its best American colleges," author Bruce Gottlieb put forth many criticisms of the rankings and accused U.S. News of changing its methodology from year to year in order to shake up the top ranked schools and keep the public's interest [11]. Gottlieb stated, "A successful feature like this [i.e., the U.S. News rankings] requires surprise, which means volatility. Nobody's going to pay much attention if it's Harvard, Yale, and Princeton again and again, year after year." Two U.S. News editors, Peter Cary and Brian Duffy, took to the pages of Slate to respond with "Dissension in the rankings: U.S. News responds to Slate's best colleges story" [12].

"IP Specialty Rankings in U.S. News & World Report" is a fascinating look at rankings from a faculty member at a highly regarded law school [13]. Thomas G. Field, professor in the top ranked intellectual property law program at the Franklin Pierce Law Center, authors the article and comes to the conclusion that the answer to the question "what do the U.S. News rankings mean?," is "not much.""

http://www.library.illinois.edu/edx/rankoversy.htm

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Thank you, elkpark!

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