Another round of college rankings emerge today so if you haven't had your fill with those paltry national rankings, you can get ready to rumble with the World University Rankings over at Times Higher Education.  You will surely be shocked to find a list topped by Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, Oxford and the like. 

It is tempting to just ignore the growing number of ranking vehicles out there, but we can't. We continue to be concerned about what the rankings do and do not say about all of higher education, even though they focus on a small proportion of institutions that do not enroll the majority of students in this country.

That was our purpose when we first wrote about the seemingly impossible information being reported by institutions in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings concerning the percentage of tenured full-time faculty they had teaching at their institutions.  Inside Higher Ed picked up the story from there confronting various institutions about the information they provide U.S. News.  Their answers ran the gamut from the University of Nebraska's interesting contortion of the question to North Carolina State's even more disturbing answer which revealed that they don't even really think of part-time faculty as part of the institution.

Despite acknowledging these clear inconsistencies, Robert Morse, who heads up the rankings for U.S News, told IHE: "We will not change the rankings or go back to each school."  In response, AFT President Randi Weingarten sent a letter to Mr. Morse layong out a number of problems with both the data and its use:

Our concern rests not only with the inaccuracy of the data, but also with the message implied by the answers to your survey's question about the percentage of full-time faculty. The implication of the data is that the vast majority of faculty at these institutions work full-time and are primarily responsible for the instruction of the students who attend them. 

Weingarten offers to work with U.S. News on improving the survey. She suggests that the magazine could provide more useful information to parents and students if it asked more detailed questions about how colleges and universities staff their classrooms.

We believe that U.S. News & World Report could provide parents and students with valuable information about the faculty and instructional staff at a college or university if your survey asked institutions:

1. How many full-time faculty are employed at the institution? How many part-time faculty? How many graduate teaching assistants?
2. What percentage of undergraduate courses at the institution are taught by each employee group?
3. What is the average compensation per course for each group?

These questions would provide prospective students and parents with a sense of how deeply an institution invests in undergraduate education and what kind of access students will have to their instructors.

We await Mr. Morse's reply.