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BY MATTHEW FITTING

In print | Published September 4, 2003 — Updated February 09, 2009 15:22

When Swarthmore’s ranking dropped from second to third among liberal arts colleges in the 2004 edition of U.S. News and World Report, Elizabeth Ioo didn’t notice, but her father did.

A senior from Bronx High School of Science, Ioo recently visited Swarthmore, which she read about in a book of colleges and, she said, simply found interesting.

“They’re just numbers,” she said of the rankings, which can be misleading. Her dad, however, is always online checking them.

But Ioo thinks her fellow classmates — and father — “take it too seriously.” Not only are numbers unreliable when picking a college, she said, but the ratings don’t change much. Swarthmore, in fact, has not been outside the top three since the magazine began the rankings, usually along with Williams, ranked first this year, and Amherst.

“It’s more on an individual level,” added Doris Yen, also from Bronx Science. She said she would look at the rankings to determine a school’s competitiveness, but “wouldn’t consider it a major factor. I think it’s really about how I fit in,” she said.

Students need to make sure a college or university is a match for them, according to Dean of the College Bob Gross ‘62. "We’re not looking for everybody," he said. “We’re looking for students who fit into Swarthmore culture.”

U.S. News has admitted its rankings are not the only tool in the college search process, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jim Bock ’90. The magazine recently published guides on college essay writing and campus profile collections. “At best it should only be a starting place,” Bock said of the rankings. “We expect [prospective students] to take it further than that.”

Why the drop?

Outside of believing that personal experience should guide those selecting colleges, Gross said that, in addition, the administration is wary to try to change Swarthmore’s ranking — and in some cases is unable to.

U.S. News’s decision no longer to count yield — the percentage of students offered admission who accept — was the main factor in this year’s rankings shakeup. Speculation that most colleges were manipulating their yield was cited as the reason for the change in methodology. Swarthmore still leads in terms of student selectivity, which accounts for 15 percent of the whole ranking (Williams comes in second, and Amherst fourth).

Bock said the drop was in no way related to the football cuts from four years ago.

One of the few steps the college is considering to help move back to the top two is counting independent studies and directed readings as classes with fewer than 20 students — a major category in the rankings — but only because “we want to make sure it’s a level playing field,” the dean said. “If other people are counting them” — and they are — “we’re going to count them.”

In addition, according to Bock, the total number of classes with fewer than 20 students, excluding directed readings and independent studies, has been dropping in recent years due to a minor increase in college enrollment.

Another area Gross cited as an example of the college’s inability to alter the rankings is faculty compensation. Swarthmore compensates its assistant and associate faculty better than competitors like Amherst. But Amherst employs more full-time professors — for which the rankings give more points.

Gross also speculated that tweaking criteria year to year is partly because U.S. News wants to consistently shake up the rankings. “If you had the same thing every year,” he said, “it wouldn’t be news.”

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