Big 5 rating titillates folk at U-M

Big 5 rating titillates folk at U-M

But there are faults contained in surveys

By Max Gates 

NEWS SCIENCE REPORTER

Surveys of academic reputation possess a high “titillation value.”

But they are of little help to students selecting an undergraduate or graduate school, says the author of a widely cited study.

“These studies are not a good guide for high school seniors or undergraduates trying to decide where to go to school,” said Everett C. Ladd of the University of Connecticut.

And yet.... Who can resist the temptation to cite an authority who places your school, your department, at or near the top of the academic heap?

As part of their 1977 study, still commonly cited because it remains the most recent rating of U.s. universities, Ladd and coauthor Seymour Lipset of Stanford University asked some 4,000 faculty members across the country to list the “five departments nationally in your discipline that have the most distinguished faculties.”

Their results placed the University of Michigan fifth over-all, behind Harvard, the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Chicago.

“OUR QUESTION was about research,” Ladd said. “That is very different from asking where the best teaching is being done. I haven't the foggiest notion about teaching programs.”

Ladd said that an assessment of teaching programs would be almost impossible because it would require lengthy on-site visits to every college and university.

“I have formed a few impressions over the years,” Ladd noted. “One of them is that many research universities do only an average job in undergraduate teaching. Research and teaching often conflict, and teaching is not rewarded because it is hard to quantify.

“On the other hand, I have been struck by the quality programs in schools of little note where a small group of faculty have come together and made a special effort. It is not always money that is important in successful teaching.”

The Ladd and Lipset study is the most recent of a number of surveys of academic quality and reputation conducted from time to time since 1980.

These surveys inevitably draw criticism, usually for their methods or for the fact that faculty members’ knowledge of other departments around the country is often outdated. Ladd recalled that “the mathematicians at NYU were reported furious that they were left out of the top 10.”

Lipset of Stanford, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, noted, however, that the Ladd-Lipset survey revealed few changes from earlier surveys on the reputations of departments.

“While a university's place among the top five or 10 institutions may shift, there has been general agreement in a variety of surveys about which institutions should be included,” Lipset wrote. 

U-M faculty and administrators have usually reponded favorably to surveys because the University almost always gets high marks.

THE U-M USUALLY usually finds itself rated with Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, California: Berkeley and Chicago as the top overall academic institutions in the country.

U-M admissions officials say that the University’s consistently high ratings help in attracting quality students, though they say they don’t use the rankings as a sales pitch to prospective enrollees.

The only place where the University has consistently come up short has been in assessments of the quality of the medical school. Unlike most of the University’s major schools and department, it rarely rates in the top 10 in the country.

U-M administration has publicly blamed the medical school’s low ranking on the aging University Hospital building ; but the University also has quietly spent a lot of money and made a lot of promises in recent years to attract young, new faculty members.

The chief criticism of most university ratings is that they are attempting to measure intangibles, the relative quality of education. Unlike college football rankings which can sometimes be decided in direct competition, there is no way for, say, the U- M’s psychology department to go one-on-one against its competitors from Stanford.

The criteria for the rankings are always open to challenge.

“Every rating that comes out, somebody always complains. There is no such thing as a perfect survey,” said one U-M spokesman. ‘‘You’re talking about the quality of an institution, and that is a wide open subject. How do you measure the quality of a faculty or an academic program?”

AND THE OPINIONS of those outside a university may not agree with those inside. For example, an often-cited 1977 survey by Dr. Jack Gourman at California State University, Northridge, found the U-M’s geography department to be the second best in the country. Nevertheless, U-M’s administration voted to disband the department, saying it had fallen behind academically.

The U-M likes to cite ratings prepared in 1974 by researchers from Columbia University which ranked the U-M among the top five universities in the United States.

The Columbia University study was prepared by Peter Blau and Rebecca Margulies. They asked deans of professional schools to list the top five schools in their area of specialization. Deans were not allowed to list their own school.

Gourman at Cal State-North- field updated his 1967 survey four years ago.

Gourman devised his own rating system, which considered such factors as administration, range of academic programs and degrees, admission requirements, faculty and teaching loads, physical facilities, finances and research. His information was gathered through questionnaires.

GOURMAN RANKED the U-M third over-all.

He also made an attempt to rate such factors as administration (U-M eighth), alumni associations (U-M fourth), athletic- academic balance (U-M 11th), counseling centers (U-M 22nd), libraries (U-M sixth) and regents/trustees (U-M 20th).

And then there is Gene R. Hawes, who, three years ago, began rating universities on the basis of faculty salaries, social prestige as determined by the number of past and present students listed in the ‘‘Social Register’ and social achievement, based on the number of alumni listed in “‘Who’s Who in America.”

The U-M ranked only 30th in social prestige, but was fifth in social achievement, an indication that the University takes middle and upper middle class youths and transforms them into the country’s professional elite. And that metamorphosis is accomplished by a faculty which — according to Hawes — is only 21st in pay nationally.

ABOUT THE STUDIES:

The COLUMBIA study, published in 1974, rated professional schools in 18 fields. Deans of the professional schools were asked to list the five outstanding schools in their own field, excluding their own school. The University of Michigan rated highly in several other fields besides those listed in the chart above, including: Public Health (1st), Social Work (3rd), Library Science (tied for 2nd), Pharmacy (9th), Forestry (10th). Three of the fields rated in the survey are not taught at the U-M: (Optometry, Theology, Veterinary Medicine).

The LADD&LIPSET study, published in 177, rated graduate and undergraduate departments in 19 disciplines. Over 4,000 faculty members were asked to name the five departments nationally in your discipline that have the most distinguished faculties.' In disciplines not listed in the above chart, the U-M ranked in the top ten in Biological Sciences (6th) and Foreign Languages (9th), but was not ranked in Agriculture & Forestry, Chemistry or Physics.

The GOURMAN study, published in 1977, rated undergraduate programs in 68 fields and professional schools in law, medicine and dentistry on such criteria as faculty, standards of instruction, scholastic work of students, performance of graduates, attitude and policy of ad- ministration, research and scholarly production. Data was gathered from the institutions by means of a questionnaire.

* Discipline not rated in this study. 
* Gourman ranked undergraduate Engineering departments by specialization rather than overall. The U-M received the following rankings: Aerospace (2nd), Chemical (8th), Civil (7th), Electrical (5th), Engineering Mechanics (1st), Engineering Physics (3rd), Industrial (2nd), Materials (3rd), Mechanical (4th), Metallurgical (tied for 10th), Nuclear (2nd).