LSU President F. King Alexander lambasts the country’s foremost college ranking system in a new special report from Politico, which finds the U.S. News & World Report’s annual college ranking has provided perverse incentives for schools and has driven economic inequality at some of the nation’s largest colleges. The magazine will release its much-anticipated list Tuesday.
“I think U.S. News has done more damage to the higher education marketplace than any single enterprise that’s out there,” Alexander tells Politico. LSU was ranked No. 135 in the country in last year’s rankings, a drop of six spots from the year previous. The school ranked No. 64 among all public schools.
But LSU has had a conflicted relationship with the magazine’s annual rankings. While dozens of higher education leaders—including Alexander—have criticized the methodology as a driver of economic inequality at campuses, the rankings still prove influential to parents and students.
LSU, in fact, has repeatedly touted their spot in the rankings in recent years, playing up good news in one of the nation’s most important resources for students and parents looking for a college. At the same time, Alexander and other higher education leaders have criticized the ranking as putting too much weight into criteria that drive up tuition and spending money on students who don’t need it.
“We’ll definitely talk about it. We always want to do well,” says Ashley Berthelot-Arceneaux, LSU director of presidential and policy communications. “(But) we are much more interested in the actual public good that our university produces in terms of solutions to the state.”
Berthelot-Arceneaux points to the White House College Scorecard, an official government tool Alexander helped develop, as a better system for determining the country’s best colleges. In the three main criteria on the scorecard—average annual cost, graduation rate and salary after attending—LSU scores better than average.
Plus, LSU’s new strategic plan represents the school’s goal of focusing on being central to meeting the state’s challenges, Berthelot-Arceneaux adds.
“It’s not meant to take the place of a ranking,” she says. “But it is a way for us to demonstrate to ourselves and our constituents that we are taking students and turning them into leaders.”
—Sam Karlin
