U.S. News Rankings Shouldn't Shape UNC's Plans for Future

However, if you haven't noticed, none of the signs on campus have changed. Our T-shirts still say UNC and not 28BNDU. The names painted in the end zones at Kenan Stadium haven't been altered.

Why is this?

Well, it's because we have an obstinate chancellor who refuses to bow down to his supposed superiors -- the editors of U.S. News & World Report.

During last year's State of the University Address, Chancellor James Moeser referred to the U.S. News rankings as "arbitrary and artificial." Instead of relying on them, the chancellor wants to define our excellence independently, by designing our own criteria for judging ourselves against our competing peer institutions -- University of California-Berkeley, University of Michigan, UC-Los Angeles and the University of Virginia.

This isn't to say that everyone here at No. 28 is with the chancellor on this. A few weeks ago, an editorial ran in this newspaper arguing that the chancellor shouldn't ignore rankings that have become a national benchmark. It claimed that administrators "run the risk of bias intruding into their system" by using self-designed criteria.

So why is it then that the chancellor has taken this position?

His critics would point out that U.S. News judges universities on indicators that almost any objective person would agree are relevant for assessing their quality. Their main criteria are academic reputation, retention and graduation of students, faculty resources and selectivity of admissions.

Of all the indicators, academic reputation is the most subjective -- it is determined by polling university administrators about the quality of other institutions. Moeser has recently complained about its arbitrary nature, but Chapel Hill does better in this category than in any other. If academic reputation were the only factor in the formula, UNC would vault five spots in the rankings.

The remaining three primary factors are more concrete, based on data collected on everything from six-year graduation rates to the faculty/student ratio. In all of these, Chapel Hill performs worse than all of our peer institutions. Our worst category by far is faculty resources because of our anemic faculty salaries and the fact that 61 percent of our classes have more than 20 students.

Is the chancellor just pouting because we don't stack up?

In response, the chancellor would likely assert that he and the editors at U.S. News basically agree on what increases the quality of education. When his administration earmarked uses for revenue generated from last academic year's campus-based tuition increase, all of it went toward improving factors that impact our U.S. News ranking.

However, the problem with blindly following the rankings is that it essentially puts University administrators into a straitjacket. Decisions must be made without regard to what's best for each university. Presidents and chancellors become like modern CEOs who are devoted to increasing stock prices but not necessarily profits.

Here's one example of how this works: Our University's selectivity score, which constitutes 15 percent of its entire ranking, could be improved by increasing our cap on the number of out-of-state students who can be admitted. But a significant increase in our cap would also constitute a vast betrayal of our University's mission to serve the people of North Carolina.

This place isn't just the 28th Best National Doctoral University that just happens to be in Chapel Hill. This is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We shouldn't want to be just another top 25 university. Instead, we should move in directions that distinguish us from the herd, even when that means violating the holy commandments of U.S. News.

Let's not be forced into a straitjacket of someone else's design.

Jim Doggett can be reached at jdoggett@email.unc.edu.