Dartmouth was recently ranked at number 18 on The Princeton Review's list of "Students Dissatisfied with Financial Aid," a part of the group's 2009 edition of the Best 368 Colleges. Not only did The Princeton Review assess these rankings before the College revealed its revamped financial aid initiative, offering free tuition to families earning less than $75,000 per year, but it used poor methods in conducting the survey, including on-line polls. The ranking defies my own experience as a student on financial aid.
This failing does not only cause one to question collegiate ranking systems, as they are self-invested with authority, but to ask whether quantifying the value of an education is desirable, or even possible.
Last year, when the U.S. News and World Report rankings last came out, the College slipped from its enviable top 10 position (it was ranked ninth) to a lowly 11th. As The Dartmouth noted at the time ("Dartmouth drops in U.S. News rankings," Aug. 17, 2007), this change had nothing whatsoever to do with the academics, social scene or general quality of life at Dartmouth. The only factor that differed from one year to the next was that the College had slipped in its peer review. Administrators at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and the like had simply rated Dartmouth lower, possibly due to the alumni-trustee debacle and ensuing public spectacle.
I imagine that your typical, intelligent person realizes that there is no difference between being ranked ninth and 11th, and that whatever factors drove the drop are probably negligible and meaningless (U.S. News and World Report does not even measure student satisfaction). But the rankings still suggest that there is a difference, and that education and the acquisition of knowledge can be measured against some universal yardstick. The truth is that it is always a foolish mistake to search for absolutes in a relative universe.
What ultimately makes an impersonal research university (like Harvard) better on an overall rating scale than a school that, at least theoretically, puts more of an emphasis on teaching and undergraduate education (like Dartmouth)? The two are incomparable because the institutions have different goals -- or at least they ought to. One wants to produce groundbreaking scholarship and research, and the other wants to provide an outstanding liberal arts education with a more individual focus. It is inane to list these two kinds of institutions on the same page.
But they are listed on the same page, and Dartmouth has had to change its persona as a liberal arts college because it is ranked alongside Columbia and Stanford instead of Bowdoin and Bates. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that Dartmouth has lost a great part of its character due to an attempt to brutally transform itself into a research university. As was observed at April's Daniel Webster Program Janus lecture, the research university wreaks special havoc on the humanities (supposedly one of Dartmouth's greatest strengths) because it forces professors in those departments to devote more and more time to researching obscure and self-parodic topics (think "Genderizations of Womanhood and The Other in Faust") instead of focusing on their true task of fostering an appreciation for the Good, the Beautiful and the True.
If we believe that our principles are the only thing that can redeem us and make us more than clothed apes, we ought to withdraw from these irrational and illogical rankings and refuse to acknowledge their validity. After that's done, the College can do whatever it thinks is best for education (which is all it should be doing) instead of making deposit after deposit on its insurance as a member of the Ivy League elite.
These insidious rankings, of which this financial aid lie is merely the most recent, attempt to quantify the unquantifiable and turn the thirst for knowledge and truth into a sort of rankings roulette.
We should be less like Harvard, less like Cornell and more like Dartmouth. There is an old proverb told by the Hasidic Rabbi Zusya, "When I die, they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" This is the question that no ranking or statistic can answer. It is, however, the only question the community of higher education should ask of us, and more importantly, the only question we should ask of ourselves.
