Universities howl as rankings drop because of revised Maclean's criteria

Maclean's just can't win. It is riding out a campaign by some of Canada's biggest universities to boycott its annual university rankings; they complain that the listings are junk methodology, even though they were based on questionnaires the universities had completed themselves.

The boycott continues, but now universities who were not part of it are complaining that stripped-down criteria have resulted in some steep drops in ranking. No fair, they say. We've been working so hard to meet your original criteria.

Rankings have for years been based on about 22 measures, everything from scholarships, student entrance grades and library spending. However, in the face of the boycott and loss of cooperation from many universities, Maclean's pared back to 13 so that it could use only publicly available data from such reliable sources as Statscan. In part, they say, this was rather than basing ranking on possibly unreliable and self-serving data from the universities themselves. (Universities still supply supplementary data and it appears in the fat Maclean's university issue, but these don't factor in the all-important overall ranking.)

As an example of the "you can't win for trying" department, look at this editorial in the Cape Breton Post, commenting on the drop from 13th place to 21st by Cape Breton University (CBU).

While Maclean’s can now say there’s a new measure of objectivity for its rankings, it’s at the cost of making the ranking system more arbitrary. The list is based now not on a comprehensive set of indicators, controversial through that list and its weightings may have been over the years, but on what happens to be available from a narrow list of sources. It’s hard to see this as improving the ranking system overall.

Has it been a mistake for CBU to pay attention to the Maclean’s survey in recent years and try to climb the ladder? It would be only if this were skewing priorities in a futile chase after a magazine’s definition of quality, ignoring the particular needs of the institution that can’t be generically derived. This sudden turn of fortune in the rankings is a reminder to CBU that while it’s OK to have an eye on marketing, the development of the university must be guided by a core vision. That’s something that can’t be bought off a newsstand.

Sigh.