Like most students here, I come across the Dartmouth homepage multiple times a day. And when I do, I almost always find some news blurb about how we were recently a top ranked college in some category or another. In fact, two of the four news links on our homepage right now are a Payscale.com story listing us as the top Ivy League school by salary potential and a ranking by The Daily Beast that names us as the top college for producing technology leaders both of which have been on the home page for more than a week now.
I'm no fan of colleges boasting about their rankings, so even though this is my alma mater, I am still somewhat irked by how prominently we advertise any new ranking that puts us in positive light. Upon looking through the websites of the other Ivy League schools, it seems that none of them had any news stories about rankings within the last few months even though these prestigious institutions probably were at the top of some ranking recently. Instead, their home pages have stories about the latest research, talks and interviews done with their professors. To be fair, our site also includes news about what faculty and students have accomplished of late, but this apparently second-rate material is tucked away in a link
Among the "second-rate" news from last week were some research done by Dartmouth professors on food allergies that was reported on NBC Nightly News and work concerning the effect of R-rated movies on teens that was featured on CBS Evening News. It's funny how two studies that were noteworthy enough to be highlighted by the national media never found their way to the news section of our own home page, losing in precedence to the Payscale and Daily Beast rankings. And this isn't the first time that we chose to highlight our rankings at the expense of displaying the innovative work done by professors and students. Last fall, when U.S. News and World Report named Dartmouth as the best college for undergraduate teaching, this "news" remained one of the top stories on our website for several months. The ranking was a nice pat on the back when it first came out, but you don't need to be a journalist to know that after a half a year, a story isn't very newsworthy anymore.
The College's keenness to publicize its rankings extends far beyond what we have on our home page. Our status as the school that has the best undergraduate teaching and that produces the highest-paid graduates has become quite a hot topic on campus, finding its way into numerous speeches by College President Jim Yong Kim and becoming a surefire piece of information that is pointed out to every prospie who visits. Don't get me wrong. These rankings are something that we can be proud of and no doubt make easy selling points when convincing people that Dartmouth is a great college. Yet, if we see some other school promote their U.S. News rankings or the like, we would be sure to deride them for being pretentious and perhaps even a little desperate. What makes Dartmouth any different? Granted our name may not rhyme with "arvard," but we're not immune to being perceived as a bunch of stuck up people who base their pride in their school on some artificial lists that a magazine publishes.
But maybe it's because our name doesn't rhyme with "arvard" that we feel compelled to show off our rankings in order to prove ourselves. But these rankings are all shallow and inherently flawed, being produced by companies more interested in selling issues and generating readership than accuracy. Since there's no way to truly determine what the "best" college in the country is or which school produces the best-paid graduates, all college rankings are ultimately based on some arbitrary criteria and are debatable at best. Dartmouth is a great institution, but we don't need U.S. News or Payscale to tell us that. Instead of focusing on rankings whose validity will always be questionable, we should shift the spotlight to some of the real accomplishments of the College, like some of the amazing work done by our faculty and students. At the end of the day, it is these achievements that will garner true respect for the College.
