In Pursuit of Prestige: the Folly of the US News and World Report Survey
"Oh my goodness!" That is a sanitized version of my actual response when I realized in late December 2011 that another US News and World Report (USNWR) survey had arrived and that I had missed my opportunity to "vote." Somehow, my questionnaire got lost among the large volume of mail that flows through my office. Fortunately, after some frantic and determined communication with USNWR, we were directed to the group running the survey (it is subcontracted to someone else) and I was able to submit my opinion. When I glanced at the ballot, I wondered how administrative voters at the 124 other colleges and schools of pharmacy listed would have informed opinions about the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy. They may know that a required research experience for all our doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) students is a key and highly valued feature of our curriculum because it was described at a 2011 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy meeting and a few years ago in an American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education editorial. (1) They may know about the positive impact our faculty members and alumni have had on the profession of pharmacy, pharmaceutical science, and society since 1868. But would they know, for example, that we have instituted a new PharmD curriculum in the past 2 years that extensively uses active-learning techniques? Would they know the extent to which our academic medical center/health system and college are operationally, educationally, and philosophically integrated? I concluded that only a few of the USNWR survey respondents would know about these defining attributes and most of these individuals would be our graduates. I also concluded that, despite being in academia for 35 years, I knew comparatively little about many of the colleges and schools on the list, especially the newer ones. I was not always this invested in the periodic USNWR survey. In fact, when I received my first questionnaire as a dean in fall 2007, I casually completed and returned it. The results were published in 2008 and we were ranked fifth. That we were perceived positively by our fellow educators was gratifying, but because of the survey's limitations (eg, it only measured "reputation" focused exclusively on our PharmD program, and based its conclusions on a relatively low response rate of 56%), I chose to ignore the results. I assumed everyone else, including our key constituents (university administrators, alumni, current, and prospective students), would either be unaware of the rankings or ignore the findings for the same reasons I had. I was wrong. Soon after the results were published, I started receiving comments from our PharmD students. They were upset that we had dropped from previous rankings (I think from third to fifth) and that we had tied (rather than outranked) Ohio State University (spillover from the 2 universities' storied rivalry in football and other sports). The students wanted to know what I was going to do to improve our standing next time (a tough question). Similar observations also arrived from our alumni. I was troubled but understood that both constituent groups are prone to ascribe disproportionate value to these ranking systems because they are not familiar with our internal assessment processes. Then, to my chagrin, our university administrators started commenting on the rankings. Fortunately, it was positive for us, as our college was one among many highly-ranked units on campus, and our alleged superiority provided fodder for playful one-upmanship with my University of Michigan dean colleagues, enlivening otherwise serious meeting topics. However, I also recognized that our administrators were using these rankings to argue for more resources as a means to protect or improve their/ our strong reputation, an administrative practice common both nationally and globally. (2) The collective interest in these ranking systems was troubling and I was faced with a dilemma: how to acknowledge our positive reputation among our fellow educators, while guarding against repercussions from future unpredictable shifts that inevitably occur in reputational surveys. …