HARTFORD, Conn. – The decision by more than 60 liberal arts colleges not to participate in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of higher education institutions has rendered the latest results – already suspect to begin with – virtually meaningless.

Trinity College is among the more than 60 members of the Annapolis Group, an organization of top liberal arts schools, which announced in June 2007 that it would no longer participate in the most controversial segment of the 25-year-old survey, a question asking colleges to assess their competition.

That peer-review question -- which is asked of presidents, deans of faculty, and deans of admissions -- accounts for 25 percent of a school’s ranking, making it relatively easy to skew the results. That question is the most heavily weighted contributor to an individual school’s numerical ranking.

U.S. News, which has a circulation of roughly 2 million, publishes its college rankings in August each year. The 2009 edition will be released today.

In spurning the peer-review survey, the school presidents agreed, as an alternative, to develop a web-based tool that prospective students and their parents could use to compare colleges. To that end, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities created the University and College Accountability Network, dubbed U-CAN, a college search tool noted for providing objective, comparable data.

More than 700 private institutions, including Trinity, are participating in U-CAN and have published profiles that include information on admissions, enrollment, diversity, graduation rates, most popular degrees, cost, financial aid, and much more. To view Trinity’s information, which is also located on the U-CAN site, www.ucan-network.org, please visit: www.trincoll.edu/orgs/planning/reports.html.

Unlike U.S. News & World Report, U-CAN does not include reputation surveys or rankings. The U-CAN site has been praised for its consumer-relevant information, and colorful user-friendly format. Since U-CAN went live last September, more than 358,000 users have visited the site.

In addition to refusing to participate in the U.S. News & World Report’s assessment, Trinity and the more than 60 members of the Annapolis Group agreed to remove any mention of the rankings from their respective publications.

“We commit not to mention U.S. News or similar rankings in any of our new publications since such lists mislead the public into thinking that the complexities of American higher education can be reduced to one number,” said James F. Jones, Jr., President and Trinity College Professor in the Humanities, in signing the commitment statement.

The vast majority of the Annapolis Group colleges withdrew from the U.S. News survey because of the many defects in the process, among them:

• Schools are not always forthright about the data. Also, it is easy to make mistakes given the complexity of the system.
• Stories exist of boards of trustees offering bonuses to their presidents if their schools’ ranking improves.
• The peer-review assessments are often made blindly and without the information needed to answer the question forthrightly.
• Items that ought to be given a high value (e.g., low faculty-student ratios) are given a disproportionately low value.
• Too much emphasis is placed on an institution’s financial resources.

Nonetheless, Trinity will continue to provide the essential information that prospective students and their parents need in making their college selection.

Trinity speaks from a position of strength, with the highest enrollment in its history and the highest alumni-giving participation rate in more than 30 years. Founded in 1823, Trinity has more than 2,200 undergraduates from 43 countries and 30 states. The faculty and alumni include recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Award, Guggenheims, Fulbrights, and other national academic awards.

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