Chronicle of Higher Education: Most Colleges Chase Prestige on a Treadmill, Researchers Find, by Peter Schmidt:
The pursuit of institutional prestige has done little to improve the reputations of most colleges and, in fact, may be causing many of them to become less distinguishable from their competitors, according to research presented here on Saturday at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
"Is the price of prestige worth pursuing?," asked Robert M. Hendrickson, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park and moderator of a panel discussion of much of the research. Arguing that the quest for prestige "has time and again failed, and weakened institutions," he said colleges should focus on carrying out their basic missions and improving their academic offerings, and "let the chips fall where they may." …
In one study presented here, Kyle V. Sweitzer, a data-resource analyst at Michigan State University's office of planning and budgets, and J. Fredericks Volkwein, a senior scientist at Penn State's Center for the Study of Higher Education, examined changes over nine annual issues in how colleges' undergraduate programs were rated by peer institutions in surveys administered by U.S. News & World Report. They found that only about two out of five institutions saw significant changes in their scores from 1999 to 2007, and the single biggest driver of such fluctuations was changes in colleges' admissions selectivity. …
All the efforts by colleges to improve their reputations did not appear to have bolstered how colleges over all were viewed by peers, the study concluded. The average score that colleges received in the U.S. News peer-assessment surveys remained unchanged over nine years, suggesting that college officials responding to the surveys viewed the ratings as a zero-sum game. …
The best predictor of whether a college's reputation would rise was whether it increased the share of its entering freshmen who had been in the top quarter of their high-school class. An improvement in a college's graduation rate—an outcome closely related to selectivity—was the second best predictor of whether its reputation-based score would rise. Changes in the number of publications produced by each faculty member was correlated with changes in the reputation of comprehensive colleges in statistical but not practical terms because each faculty member would have to produce 10 additional publications a year for a college's rating to rise significantly, Mr. Sweitzer said.
