From President Ryan: Meaningful Rankings Consider a School’s Outputs

I am a little skeptical of college rankings, as they are imperfect at best and can sometimes create perverse incentives—encouraging schools to go in the wrong direction simply in search of a higher ranking. I am not alone in my skepticism. Recently, a number of law and medical schools decided not to share data with U.S. News and World Report, which releases rankings that continue to dominate the field.

That said, there is one set of rankings that deserves attention: rankings related to value, which try to measure the return on a family’s investment in higher education. I was therefore pleased to see that Princeton Review ranked UVA No. 2 best value among public universities, up one spot from last year, and that Money Magazine rated UVA as one of 34 universities, public or private, to receive its highest rating for return on investment.

To understand why measures of value are worth paying attention to, let me take a step back. Our aim, as stated on the first page of our strategic plan, is for UVA to be, hands-down, the best public university in the country. That raises the obvious question of how to measure success. One of the problems with traditional rankings, like those of U.S. News, is that they emphasize inputs—like class sizes or the funding available for research, all of which are related to the resources available to schools. But most families and incoming students are, and should be, concerned not simply about the resources available but how well those resources are deployed—and what results are achieved. Similarly, those who fund research are, and should be, interested in the productivity and quality of the research being produced.

This is why, in our strategic plan, we predicted that rankings would change over time to focus more on outcomes than inputs. We predicted, for example, that universities would be judged by how long it takes students to graduate, how much debt they carry, and how well students are prepared to succeed after graduation. Similarly, we predicted that research universities would be judged by their research productivity, influence and impact—on students, on other scholars and on the world around them.

UVA offers an exceptional value in higher education, especially for Virginia students. 

That’s where “best value” rankings come in, as they are based on outcomes—including graduation rates, job placement rates and average amount of debt carried by graduates. These rankings, in effect, already focus on what we believe truly matters. What we are also starting to see, which is both interesting and promising, is that even traditional ranking systems like U.S. News are shifting their focus toward outcomes. In May of this year, U.S. News announced that it was dropping some input measures to focus more on outcomes, saying it wanted to ensure that the measures “emphasize the outcomes for graduates of the schools in our rankings.” If this trend continues, as I expect it will, we are likely to see “best value” and “best” rankings collapse into a single ranking.

The University of Virginia is well-positioned for this trend, as it offers an exceptional value in higher education, especially for Virginia students. One simple way to determine value is to look at the relationship between price and quality: The lower the price and the better the quality, the higher the value. As for price, a student from Virginia could not find lower tuition than UVA’s at any school ranked within the top 50 in the country. In addition, we are one of only two public universities that meet all demonstrated financial need, and we have been ranked No. 1 by the Princeton Review for financial aid among public universities for three years in a row. In terms of quality, we have outstanding graduation rates, retention rates and job placement rates, as well as an unparalleled alumni network. We have also increased our research productivity quite substantially in the past decade.

Put simply, the world of rankings and ratings is moving in the direction of focusing on outcomes and recognizing that the best colleges and universities are the ones that offer the best value. This is good for higher education, because it will incentivize universities to focus more attention on what matters to all who invest in it—whether families, the state legislature, federal research funding agencies or donors. It is also good for UVA, because this is what we are focused on as well.

James E. Ryan (Law class of ’92)
President of the University of Virginia