Ranking the School Rankers

March 24, 2008
Trina Vaux

Periodicals like to rank things. Especially schools. Ranking sells papers. Many years ago, U.S. News & World Report started ranking colleges and universities, then Newsweek started ranking colleges and universities. Ranking became an epidemic.

Not to be outdone by their big brothers, newspapers now rank schools. The latest to join the ranking ranks is The New York Sun, which in January 2008 published its assessment of some of New York City’s independent schools — 23 of them. Six schools got As, six got Bs, (they must have marked on a curve), six more got Cs — all give or take a few pluses and minuses — and, finally, five got Ds.

Why the Ds? There are five very good schools in the D category, schools with thorough curricula, experienced teachers, good students who go on to good colleges that suit them, and satisfied parents. They got Ds because they’re not as rich as the others and/or, they don’t send as many kids to Harvard.

Elizabeth Green, who wrote the story, said that the Sun had “drafted its own new ranking system, the New York Sun Private School Index.” An impressive invention. But wait. The “data points” for the newspaper’s system were easily acquired raw statistics: the net assets of the school as reported on tax forms and the number of students from the school who appeared in last fall’s freshman register of Harvard University.

Oh, Harvard — no Yale, no Princeton, no Stanford, none among the enormous number of non-Ivy-League colleges and universities spread all over the country. There’s just one educational Mecca in all of the United States, only one university worth going to: Harvard. And if Rensselaer Polytechnic or the University of Chicago or UCLA have a particular program that a student wants, or offers a better financial aid package — well, that just doesn’t count.

Now, I have nothing against Harvard. Lots of good people go there and they get a good education and go off and do good things in the world. What I’m not at all sure of is the validity of The New York Sun’s criteria for schools that provide a good pre-Harvard education.

According to the Sun, the richer the school and the more of its graduates go to Harvard, the better it is, and the higher its grade. All, of course, in fairness, carefully adjusted for the number of students at each school. Nothing there about small classrooms or teachers committed to their students. Are the students in the A schools really getting a good education, developing a lifelong love of learning? We don’t know. They just go to a rich school and turn up in the Harvard freshman “facebook.”

I’ve been an administrator hanging around schools for the last 20 years or so. I’ve spent a lot of time in classrooms. And I’ve seen a lot of rankings. I also read newspapers. So I’ve decided to rank newspapers. Maybe it will boost readership.

In keeping with the Sun’s inventive criteria, I might test the porosity of a variety of newspapers — their effectiveness as bird cage liners or puppy training material. How well do they go through a shredder?

But I do want to be fair. And, like the Sun, I want to use purely quantitative, objective statistics. No maundering about how careful the reporters are, how deeply they delve into a subject. No judgments on fairness, balance, or the quality of the writing. And I’m certainly not going to look at the number of Pulitzers the papers have garnered for excellence (whatever that is) in reporting. No, I want straight numbers.

I could consider price. Perhaps that’s an indication of how good a paper is. The daily price of The Philadelphia Inquirer just went up from 50 to 75 cents. It must be better now than it was a month ago.

I could count pages. Certainly, the more pages a paper has, the better it must be? By that measure, all papers must be much better between Thanksgiving and Christmas than they are at any other time of the year. Some have bigger type than others; some have more pictures. The number of pages as an indication of quality in a newspaper is clearly too superficial for an enterprise as serious as my ranking.

I could look at their net worth or their share price. But many of them are held by conglomerates, so teasing those numbers out would be time consuming and difficult. And the next thing I knew, I’d be into spread sheets and P/E ratios. That’s like looking at curriculum and student/teacher ratios. Too much. Besides, there’s a more relevant number. Not that relevance is particularly — well — relevant in this sort of exercise.

Circulation. Now there’s an indicator, an automatic ranking — the number of people who actually get the paper. If lots of people get it, then it must be good. And the paper that the most people get must have the highest standard of journalism. It must be the best of the best.

But just one indicator, as the Sun knows, isn’t really sufficient for a proper ranking. I need another, one with clout, one that’s easily recognizable as a sign of the very epitome of quality. So, following the Sun’s philosophy, why not give the highest ranking in this category to the newspaper that sends the highest number of its offspring to — Harvard.

The circulation part is easy. The newspapers that I’ve chosen to rank are: The New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” with over a million; The Washington Post, with almost 700,000; The Boston Globe, with not quite 400,000; and The New York Sun. The Sun’s circulation is interesting: of a total of 150,000 circulated, it doesn’t actually sell very many. It gives them away — 85,000 of them — almost half.

Now, we come to the second, and all-important indicator: the paper that sends the highest number of copies to Harvard. Admittedly, we don’t know how many professors actually read the papers. But then, the Sun doesn’t tell us how many of the legions of A-school students who are in the Harvard freshman register actually do well and stay there for four years. Nevertheless, we can extrapolate from certain knowns.

Because The New York Times is a national paper and has such a huge circulation, at least some proportion of its papers must go to Harvard. Political science department and School of Government professors presumably get The Washington Post. (The economists and business school people get The Wall Street Journal, but that isn’t in our survey.) That leaves The Boston Globe, which is, for Harvard professors, the biggest local paper, and, finally, The New York Sun. This last is a wild card. Where do those 85,000 papers that the Sun gives away go?

Putting together these two indicators, I now have the final rankings for these newspapers: The Boston Globe wins simply on the basis of proximity. It sits within the hallowed orbit of the great and glorious university in Cambridge. The New York Sun gets an F — unless — what about those orphan 85,000 copies? Is it possible that they trot along, like the perfectly ranked student from the perfectly ranked school, to the Sun’s favorite university — Harvard? Unlikely.

In the meantime, the Times and Post, are bundling up their precious brood with bed-in-a-bags and microwaves and sending them off — to Harvard, of course — but also to places like Lehigh and American University, Columbia and Syracuse, William and Mary, the University of Virginia (we’ll stick to the East coast — transportation is cheaper), Rhode Island School of Design, MIT, or any other of the myriad excellent colleges and universities around the country.

So how does our penchant for rankings look now? According to The New York Sun, schools that don’t have $100 million in net assets, whose graduates go on to a host of perfectly good colleges and universities that aren’t Harvard just aren’t up to snuff. They don’t count. By my newspaper-ranking criteria (one of which, incidentally, is their own), The New York Sun doesn’t either.

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© 2008, Trina Vaux. Reprinted with permission.

Trina Vaux is the director of communications at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.