College and University rankings have been found to affect student opinions of institutions
KNOXVILLE –- Media rankings of colleges and university MBA programs matter to students, faculty, alumni and donors. While some academics question the validity of rankings, most believe them to be correct.
KNOXVILLE –- Media rankings of colleges and university MBA programs matter to students, faculty, alumni and donors. While some academics question the validity of rankings, most believe them to be correct.
Those are among the findings of a research study done by Nissa Dahlin-Brown, assistant director of the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee.
Dahlin-Brown's study, "The Perceptual Impact of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on Eight Public MBA Programs," was published in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, a peer-reviewed, refereed, professional and scholarly journal published by Haworth Press.
U.S. News & World Report, which publishes a variety of college ranking lists, has published its rankings of the nation's top 50 MBA programs since 1990. U.S. News officials said rankings are based on reputation (40 percent), placement success (35 percent) and student selectivity (25 percent).
"I set out to discover and describe the impact of the U.S. News & World Report rankings on ranked and unranked public MBA schools," Dahlin-Brown said. She interviewed 45 faculty and administrators. Those officials represented eight unnamed colleges and universities -- three in the Tier 1 (ranked 1-25), three in Tier 2 (ranked 26-50) and two unranked institutions.
Four themes emerged from the research, according to Dahlin-Brown.
- Rankings matter
- Ranking imact policy and practice
- Rankings may be based more on appearance than substance
- Rankings are generally thought to be correct
Although most participants thought U.S. News' top-ranked schools were the nation's best, they said that's partly because those schools have good overall reputations.
"Most participants agreed that the U.S. News ranking did not measure the academic excellence of the (MBA) schools they ranked," the study states.
Dahlin-Brown's study also notes that schools with MBA programs ranked 1-25 were more positive about the rankings than those ranked 26-50, or not ranked at all.
"College rankings have become a point of controversy in the higher education community," she said. "While some think rankings are helpful to prospective students, others think the rankings are time-consuming endeavors that have little or no constructive value."
2 comments:
I really like the photo you used and I think the centering and layout work out very well.
Good use of graphic, paragraph spacing, inline links, numbered list, and colored headline. Some subheadings would work as well.
In fact, the headline needs to be aligned left for readability.
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