President Coleman’s Recent Op-Ed on College Rankings

The Rutland Herald Sunday, July 22 editorial pages featured an Op-Ed by President Coleman, which outlines her position on the upcoming US News & World Report college rankings, and the rationale of many leading liberal arts colleges decision to collectively refuse participation in next year’s survey. Articulating the central difficulty most colleges have with the way that the rankings are composed, Coleman explains: “The single most heavily weighted variable in the U.S. News survey is something called ‘reputation,’ which is determined by how the presidents and deans of the ranked colleges in turn rank the other 200-plus colleges included in the survey.” With this, Coleman notes the shortcomings and “critical variables” lost in the equation, such as, “the average size of a typical freshman class or, even more important, whether the most experienced faculty teach freshmen as often as the least experienced faculty do, are not included at all.”

Continuing, Coleman writes: “Value in a college education is the extent to which it enables students to realize their human potential…It is dependent on the individual characteristics of colleges, the people in them, and, most importantly, the students seeking admission to them, and those variables completely elude the cookie-cutter schema of national rankings.”

Coleman's vision of a liberal arts education has been recognized nationally by her place on the Select Committee of the Association of American Colleges and the board of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; she also has served as chair of the Vermont Rhodes Scholarship Trust. She has been a consultant to the Annenberg Corporation on a public broadcasting project and a visiting fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Neurosciences Institute, the Council for a Community of Democracies and on the Executive Committee of The Annapolis Group, an organization of leading independent liberal arts colleges.

To read the complete article, click here.

To listen to President Coleman discuss her thoughts on rankings with Vermont Public Radio, follow this link.

To access President Coleman’s full biography, click here.