Current Issues - Program Rankings by Public News Mentions

"To devise the rankings, researchers ran searches of the Google News archive to find out how often more than 12,700 faculty members had appeared in 6,000 news sources from 2006 to 2011. The citations for the professors in each department were tallied, averaged on a per-faculty member basis, and then ranked relative to the federal funds their programs had received." - Dan Berrett

Article Link: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Rankings-Frontier-/142197/ 

     It is no secret that the issue of how to rank colleges, universities, departments, and programs is currently at the forefront of news on Higher Education.  President Obama's new plan for higher education ranking and funding, which I commented on recently, re-sparked the debate on what constitutes quality and where does one find the value of a college degree.  It is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer.  Being very new to the field, I am still among those who say it is a too subjective question to answer - quality and value of education depend on the student in my opinion.  If you want to view this issue in academic capitalist terms, the consumer drives the value, not the researcher or anyone else.

     Unless you rank programs using the system devised by the Faculty Media Impact Project, described by Berrett in the article hyperlinked above.  The Project ranks institutions based on the number of citations in the news per faculty member in departments of Anthropology, Economics, Sociology, Psychology, and Political Science/Government. Federal funding was also considered in the rankings.  The lead on the project, Dr. Rob Borofsky, recognizes that this approach has its flaws but simultaneously feels that its merits lie in the measurement of public service.  However, Borofsky also notes that "Much research is valuable and of high quality...while not being of interest to the public" (par. 15). 

     This was the exact sentiment I shared when reading Berrett's article.  For the sake of academic freedom, scholars should be able to research where they feel holes exist in the literature.  If a scholar has left a door open for you, and you want to walk through that door and have the ability to, then no one should be able to tell you "No" - besides your tenure board, federal funding agencies, the mass media, and others.  Cynicism aside, there are multitudes of research out there that no one outside of the scholars in a specific field have read, and yet those studies were incredible discoveries in their own right and led to even more such discoveries.  Furthermore, the frameworks and theories employed by authors of studies that grasp public interest were discovered or invented by previous scholars, and I am sure that most of those scholars were not cited in the news for those articles.  

     This is not to say that Borofsky's project has no merit.  Publicly funded institutions do have some implicit responsibility to their investors. "'People dealing with social sciences should be dealing with social concerns'" (par. 8) is not an unwarranted statement.  It all depends on what you see as the purpose of higher education.  Bowen (1977) separates the goals into those for individual students and those for society, noting some academic freedom in pursuing the direct enjoyments of learning for the individual student, while noting that promotion of social welfare was important in the goals for society.  Guttman (1987) more closely approaches the issue at hand by separating the purposes into academic and societal purposes while nesting both under democratic purposes. I believe that how well an institution meets a healthy balance of these varying goals should contribute to a metric of its quality - operationalizing that metric will be the next challenge.

Citations:

Berrett, D. (2013). The new rankings frontier: Mentions in the media. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Rankings-Frontier-/142197/ 

Bowen, H. R. (1977). Investing in learning: The individual and social value of American higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Gutmann, A. (1987). Democratic education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Picture source: http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2009679209_guest18kim.html