by Kerry Halpern
The USNews and World Reports rating for Wesleyan this year was grim: once more, Wesleyan's rating dropped, this time pulling it from the top ten liberal arts schools. And why did this happen? It certainly wasn't a change in academic reputation. Wesleyan has consistently come in fifth for its academics. So what changed here at Wes, making it a worse institution than it was three years ago, when it was came in seventh? Where Wesleyan failed is the percentage of alumni giving. This seems to be an arbitrary category to rate a school on, and it seems absurd to give this criterion equal influence in the final judgements of the "best schools". USNews and World Reports justifies this by saying that the percentage of alumni giving shows the satisfaction of the students. But does it really? USNews doesn't count every one dollar donation; they have a minimum. So is it really satisfaction, or is it just percentage of rich alumni? And why should someone be expected to give their school even more of their hard earned money after they graduate? We already pay $27,000 a year, isn't this enough? If our alumni don't go into fields like investment banking and corporate law, they may still be paying off their student loans and not thinking about giving Wesleyan more money.
The values that USNews uses to judge schools are not the same that we are taught to respect at Wesleyan. Rather than placing emphasis on making money in the workplace, we value expanding minds, learning from others, and making positive changes in the world we find. These may coincide with the values of USNews, but Wesleyan has a definite disadvantage in this contest. Therefore, in order to pull up our ranking, I have some suggestions of new criteria to add to those used by USNews and World Reports. These new criteria will definitely pull Wesleyan higher in the rankings, while they make the competition more fair for other schools as well, incorporating better values to judge schools by. Money isn't enirely where it's at. Although these categories seem random, they are no more random than the criteria used now.
Percentage of students involved in publications. As a member of a student publication, I believe that it is a sign of good education as well as motivated students for a campus to have many publications. Many institutions have a newspaper and maybe one or two magazines, which some, but not a large percentage, of students work on. USNews does not take into account the activism of the students, in either clubs or on publications, and seems content to give high ratings to schools where the students simply sit around all day watching cartoons and drinking beer. Although these are important activities in a college student's life, a college with no student activity should not be able to slip its way into the top ten. Why publications? What better place to foster academic discussion outside the classroom? And look at all of the publications that Wesleyan has: we could beat any school hands down. USNews considers the amount of faculty who publish, but does not look at the amount of students who do.
Percentage of students who play (some sort of) musical instruments. Wesleyan used to be called the singing college. Now we can be said to be the musical college. It seems that everyone plays the guitar, or can drum, or play something, or sing. But in any case, music radiates from this school. How does this relate to the college experience? The arts and creative expression are very important to the learning process. As a liberal arts institution, the measure of people involved in the arts should be a factor in our strength as an institution. Music encourages people to be creative, and creativity is important in the learning process. We could ask for a measure of people involved in the arts as a whole, but musicality is just as good.
Percentage of minority students. While Wesleyan may get only a mediocre rating in this category, it should be recognized that the top schools such as Williams and Swarthmore would do worse. USNews prints these statistics, but does not use them in rating its schools. This is why Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, and Dartmouth can score so high. USNews puts its values on the quality of education in terms of dollar amounts spent, but does not value equality of education, or educational opportunities for Americans other than upper-middle-class white Americans. Even though this may hurt Wesleyan's score, it is a necessary criterion for the "top schools".
Percentage of graduates who choose to help the world instead of giving their money to their alma mater. Okay, so this is a cheap stab at the USNews people. But isn't this the message we want to send to America's youth? Change the world, help people, make a difference, money is not what's important. When you look at any of the factors used to judge schools in relation to other schools, they seem to be arbitrary. We can just as arbitrarily decide to change the criteria to something that we value. Maybe someday this message will get to the self-important editors of USNews and World Reports, and they will realize that schools can be valued for assets other than the amount in their endowment.