University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, University of Virginia and University of Florida all top the list.  But as with any ranking, you have to ask, who determines what is valuable?  Is it academics?  Is it resources?  Graduation rates? Or is it just the overall experience?

While Kiplinger’s list provides some valuable insights into the opportunities provided by public higher education, students need to determine what is most important to them when looking into which colleges to apply to.  Rankings are good place to start your research, but do not make your entire college decision based on where a college falls on a list.

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Where, exactly, can you find answers to questions like these?  A good place to start is The National Survey for Student Engagement, or NSSE (pronounced “nessie”).  This yearly survey, conducted since 2000, asks students at hundreds of colleges about their “participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college.” (NSSE website).

The NSSE survey also addresses another aspect of college life that U.S. News overlooks: how students spend their time outside of class.  After all, college is (or should be) about more than just going to class and studying.  In fact, I would argue that over the course of a college career, one can learn just as much outside of the classroom as inside it.  Unlike high school, where you’re in school for approximately seven hours a day, five days a week, in college you only attend class for 12-15 hours per week.  While you should be spending some of your “free time” studying, you’ll still have considerably more unscheduled, unstructured time than you did in high school.
To assess how students spend their time, NSSE asks about their involvement in a variety of extracurricular activities such as clubs, sports, fraterntities and sororities, and community service.  Additionally, the survey has questions about students’ participation in activities that are more academically-oriented, such as independent study, research, study abroad, and internships.  It also asks how much time students spend “relaxing and socializing”.
To find out which colleges have participated in the NSSE survey, visit the organization’s website.  There, you can view a list of all the participating colleges (organized by state) and the years they participated, or you can search for a specific college by clicking on the link on the left.  While NSSE does not publish individual colleges’ results on its website, you usually can find these on a participating college’s website.  If you know a college has participated in the survey but can’t find its results, call the admissions office.
As with the rankings in U.S. News and World Report, the data collected by the National Survey of Student Engagement should be just one source of information in your college search.  However, unlike U.S. News and many other rankings, NSSE provides a more holistic picture of the college experience.

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Stories like this beg the question, “Just how reliable are the rankings, and how much should I use them in my college search?”  When looking at rankings, it’s important to know what data went into them and to understand the methodology that was used to generate them.  For example, U.S. News collects data on colleges’ selectivity, financial resources, faculty resources (including class size and the percent of faculty with the highest degree in their fields), freshmen retention rates, and graduation rates.  All of these are factors that arguably indicate the quality of a college’s academics.

Yet, U.S. News’s rankings also are based on what the magazine calls peer assessments — ratings of colleges by presidents, provosts, and deans of admission at “peer institutions”.  In other words, the president of one college is asked to judge the academic excellence of similar colleges.  Additionally, the magazine asks high school counselors to rate colleges.  These two factors are combined for a measure that U.S. News calls undergraduate academic reputation, which accounts for 22.5 to 25 percent of a college’s overall ranking.
It seems to me that there is an inherent problem when college administrators are asked to assess other colleges.  Wouldn’t it be in an administrator’s best interest to rate a peer institution less favorably in order to boost the rankings of his or her own college?

While rankings can be a valuable source of information, they should always be taken with a grain of salt and should be one of many sources of information students use in deciding where to apply and eventually, where to enroll.  When examining rankings, ask yourself, “Are the factors that went into these rankings a good indication of what my experience will be like at this college?”  While U.S. News and World Report collects data that’s helpful in determining what one’s academic experience might be like at a particular college, keep in mind that there is much more to college than academics.  Above all, remember that just because a college is ranked number one on a certain list, that doesn’t mean it’s the number one college for you.

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