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Wesleyan joins national initiative to offer improved consumer resources
New U-CAN website offers prospective students an alternative to national college ranking information
July 23, 2007
MACON, Ga. — Wesleyan College supports a national initiative to provide comprehensive public information to help prospective students judge the quality of higher education institutions. Currently, no single objective consumer resource exists to help prospective students choose a college or university that best fits their needs. Wesleyan, joining hundreds of other private colleges, is working to offer a solution through a commitment to transparency and accountability. Participation in a new web-based project called U-CAN is one step toward the commitment to offer consumers improved resources.
Recently, the initiative gained momentum and national attention when dozens of colleges and universities publicly announced their decisions not to participate in the most heavily weighted component of U.S.News & World Report’s annual ranking of America’s Best Colleges. Wesleyan is among a growing number of colleges and universities to sign a statement prepared by the Education Conservancy advocating changes in the popular annual college ranking.
By signing the statement, Wesleyan specifically agreed not to participate in the U.S. News peer assessment survey and not to cite its past ranking successes with the national publication in future marketing campaigns. Wesleyan will continue to provide all other data to the publication. By opting out of the survey’s largest section, colleges intend to encourage U.S. News to alter its methodology, to promote best practices within the higher education industry, and to offer consumers a better resource guide. Preferred methodology would include a wider range of criteria with weighted data that is objective and measurable.
Currently, the peer assessment, or academic reputation, survey is the most heavily weighted portion of the U.S. News survey and accounts for 25 percent of the final metric. The survey asks presidents and high ranking administrators to rate other institutions based solely on reputation. “It’s hardly scientific,” said Wesleyan President Ruth Knox, “and the general public should be fully aware of the methodology behind the rankings. I, like most college presidents, simply do not have enough information on any of the 200-plus colleges that I’m asked to judge.”
“The U.S. News rankings have become so powerful that few look beyond them,” said Knox. “We intend to place a greater emphasis on our success in national surveys and studies that examine student engagement and other substantive factors indicative of academic excellence. Encouraging prospective students to consider small class size, accessible facility, post-graduate outcomes, and student engagement will advance higher education in the direction that benefits our students and our communities most.”
For Wesleyan, encouraging U.S. News to re-examine its ranking methodology is only one part of a larger initiative. Through its decision to sign the Education Conservancy statement, Wesleyan joins other members of the Annapolis Group, an organization comprised of private liberal arts colleges, who have agreed also to develop an improved consumer resource that presents information about their colleges for students to use in the college search process.
This initiative was discussed at length during the annual June meeting of the Annapolis Group colleges in Annapolis, Maryland, which brought together approximately 80 (of the 124 member) presidents and 71 academic deans of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges, the largest attendance in recent years. A majority of the Annapolis Group presidents attending the annual meeting expressed their intent not to participate in the US News peer assessment survey. The group also committed to work with the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), among others, to provide transparent and accessible public information.
Since that meeting, the NAICU has led the development of a consumer information template called the University & College Accountability Network (U-CAN). The web-based consumer resource is scheduled to launch in September 2007 and will provide easily accessible, comprehensive, and quantifiable data. Wesleyan is among hundreds of private colleges and universities who have agreed to participate in the voluntary project.
NAICU’s U-CAN is designed to give, in a common format, prospective students and their families concise, Web-based, consumer-friendly, searchable information on individual private colleges and universities. U-CAN will consist of institutional profiles that contain comparable data and hyperlinks to qualitative campus information. The information provided in the U-CAN institutional profiles is derived from the U.S. Department of Education's IPEDS survey and the Common Data Set. U-CAN will not include reputational surveys or rankings. Instead, students and families will have free online access to objective and measurable data that's supplemented by targeted hyperlinks to an institution's web site. Through the initiative, Wesleyan will work with other institutions to offer consumers the information they need to make the best college choice.
Data and narrative sections within the institutional profiles will cover: admissions, enrollment, academics, student demographics, graduation rates, most common fields of study, transfer of credit policy, accreditation, faculty information, class size, tuition and fees trends, price of attendance, financial aid, campus housing, student life, and campus safety.
“National interest in the annual U.S. News rankings and their growing popularity confirms the public’s need for reliable and accessible information about higher education institutions,” said Knox. “The objections of the Annapolis Group members to the U.S. News national rankings, and the NAICU’s initiative to offer alternative information, recognize that liberal arts colleges have an affirmative obligation to provide relevant data, especially data focusing on learning outcomes. One instrument cannot measure all kinds of learning, so there should be more than just one authoritative source of information for independent institutions. Through initiatives like the web-based U-CAN, Wesleyan is committed to provide more information and to improve the accessibility of reliable benchmark data for prospective students.”
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