President Coleman Discusses US News and World Report Rankings with Vermont Public Radio

Mitch Wertlieb, host of Vermont Public Radio’s Morning Edition, spoke with President Elizabeth Coleman today, Tuesday, June 26, 2007, about the popular US News and World Report issue that ranks colleges and universities, due out this summer. The ranking equation has come under fire because it prioritizes institutional reputation above all other measurements. The Annapolis Group, an organization of leading independent liberal arts colleges, recently announced that a majority of the institutions within the group would no longer participate.

In her interview with VPR, President Coleman urged students to shift their emphasis from “who will take me?” to “where do I want to be?,” pointing out that “rankings altogether are a limited way of doing this.” It’s really the questions students ask, and the answers to those questions, that matter in a college search—“not whether you’re 1 to 10 on some scale.”

Elizabeth Coleman is the ninth president of Bennington College, a position she has held since 1987. Before coming to Bennington she was a professor of literature at SUNY-Stony Brook and then at the New School for Social Research, where she founded and served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She is nationally recognized as a leading thinker on liberal arts education, serving on the Select Committee of the Association of American Colleges and the Executive Committee of the Annapolis Group. She delivered the keynote address at the Artes Liberales General Conference in Warsaw, Poland, on "The Relationship between Liberal Education, Freedom and Democracy" and at the Getty Museum on "Art, Artists and the Challenge of Liberal Education."

President Coleman earned her bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of Chicago, completed her master's degree at Cornell University, and received her PhD with distinction at Columbia. She has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Vermont and Hofstra University.

To listen to the full VPR Morning Edition interview, please click here.