SSU: Offensive Ranking

Claudius in Hamlet” “Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven.”

Do you belong to some group or institution, such as a college, by which you are at least occasionally or possibly even often embarrassed? Let me admit I do. The college by which I am embarrassed is Shawnee State U., where I taught for a number of years. Today, for example, the Portsmouth Daily Times  featured a story about “SSU Being Listed Among ‘Smartest’ Colleges.”  Granted it is ranked pretty low on that smart list of 501 colleges, at 460, but still it’s among the smartest. Because college rankings are a circulation building/ money making racket that U.S. News should be given the credit or blame for starting. U.S. News use to divide up about 500 colleges into four levels I, II, III, IV. But that created public relations problems, especially for those schools in group IV, the bottom group. SSU used to regularly rank near the bottom of group IV. When it did, you didn’t read about it in the PDT. You didn’t hear SSU bragging about it either. When I reported on the low rankings in River Vices, some people at SSU said the rankings were not reliable and should be ignored. But now it’s front-page news when SSU is among the smartest, even if it is pretty far down  the smart list.  What happened? Did SSU go from one of the dumbest to one of the smartest universities in America in about ten years? Unfortunately, no. What changed was how U.S. News classified the colleges. They were not I, II, III, IV. No, they were collectively all classified as I, as smart. It’s like the children in Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s imaginary hometown in Minnesota, “where all the children are above average.” All the colleges in U.S. News are now smart, it’s just that some are smarter than others. Do you understand why Public Relations pays so well? It’s because the way a thing appears is more important than what it really is, and public relations people specialize in making something appear what it’s not. Those colleges at or near the bottom are still smart, no matter how low they are.  

Shawnee State may be higher in the bottom group than it was ten years ago, but that may be because U.S. News in its ever changing criteria for ranking now attaches more importance to SAT scores than it did in the past and it allows universities, SSU included, to not report SATs for all of its students, thereby providing a skewed ranking. Some institutions deliberately have submitted falsified or incomplete data about students to U.S. News. Of course with the high ethical standards that prevail in southern Ohio, SSU would never deliberately do something like that, but in what it fails or is unable to report it has an advantage over institutions that can and do provide data on all students. I was surprised to see that in the rankings of the Washington Monthly magazine, which some people think more accurate than U.S. News rankings, SSU is ranked about in the top half of its top 200 smartest colleges. I couldn’t believe some of the good colleges SSU is ranked above in the Washington Monthly list. At this rate, SSU may be ranking as high as Ivy League colleges in another ten years. But would that be what it really is or only what it appears to be? An education is not worth much if it does not include critical thinking, that does not stress the importance of distinguishing between what something really is and what we  would like to believe it is. SSU has helped many students get an education and get ahead in life and I am glad I did my small part in helping them. But I would not be helping them if I encouraged them to mistake appearances for realities.

Those professors at SSU were right ten or fifteen years ago to question the validity of U.S. News rankings and they would be right to continue to question them now, for if SSU was not nearly as bad as it used to be ranked, it is not nearly as good as it is now ranked, as the State of Ohio recognizes by using the graduation rates at public colleges to determine how much funding those colleges get. And by that criteria SSU faces a grim fiscal future and doesn’t have Vern Riffe to bail it out any longer. About the time it is ranked as high as Princeton, SSU may go under. By that time it might have to revise Claudius’s line in Hamlet to say, “O, my rank is offensive. It smells to heaven.”