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BY SUE CHEN

In print | Published September 2, 2004

Swarthmore tied Amherst for second place among liberal arts schools in the U.S. News & World Report’s latest annual ranking of colleges, moving up from its number three ranking last year.

College officials, however, look at the report with skepticism, pointing out that the criteria by which schools are judged do not reflect the intangible factors important to the undergraduate experience.

The magazine, which has ranked Williams first for two years in a row, used up to 15 “indicators of academic quality,” including acceptance rates, faculty salary, graduation rate and alumni giving, to determine a school’s placement.

“There’s a big assumption there that selectivity, resources, reputation and whatever indices [U.S. News uses] make a particular school right for a particular student,” Dean of the College Bob Gross ’62 said.

For example, Gross pointed out that the average faculty salary at one school may be higher than another simply because it has professors with more seniority, “but does that make it a better school?”

Of course, having a high ranking in the magazine translates into free publicity for Swarthmore.

“I have mixed feelings [about the rankings],” Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jim Bock ‘90 said. "I’m grateful we’re there because it increases our visibility, especially for international students, [but do the rankings] say anything about the college? I’m not so sure."

Some students, like Nick Zeifang ‘08, may never have heard of Swarthmore without U.S. News. In his native Germany, Zeifang consulted the magazine’s rankings to learn more about American universities.

“I looked at the top 10 schools. That’s how I found out about Swarthmore,” Zeifang said.

Awo Aboagye ’08 was a high school student in Britain when she heard a presentation by a Swarthmore admissions counselor. “Afterwards, I checked U.S. News. I was pleased. [Swarthmore] was one of the top three schools,” she said.

Others did not find the rankings to be as helpful or influential in the college search process.

“I saw [the rankings and] I don’t think it affected my decision much,” Erin Martell, a Massachusetts native, said. “If you look at the top 20 schools, you know that they’re all top schools. The difference between number one and number 10 isn’t so great.”

While aware of Swarthmore’s change in the rankings, “I would have to say [they influenced me] almost not at all,” prospective student Oliver Shultz, a New York City native, said. “My initial list was propelled by the rankings to a certain extent, but the more you look at a school, the less meaningful the rankings become.”

“I think it’s great that Swat ranked second … I think it’s good to have high numbers, but it’s more the way a student interacts with a school that matters,” Shultz added.

“When my son was younger, [the ranking] was the only source I knew about,” said Youngsoo Cho as she waited for her son to finish an admissions interview. “Now, we visit the colleges.”

Little has changed in Swarthmore’s statistics in the past year, and Bock said the admissions numbers have remained the same.

Bock and Gross said the change in rankings from year to year is a ploy U.S. News uses to get people to buy more magazines.

“Colleges and universities are like 1,000-foot oil tankers — [they don’t] change very quickly … so [U.S. News] tweaks the criteria so schools end up in different places,” Gross said.

“Many of us in higher education absolutely deplore the ranking, but are absolutely powerless to do anything about them. So we live with it,” he added.

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