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Problems continue to plague Ashley borough’s new municipal building

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Job seekers from variety of backgrounds attend Times Leader Career Fair

<p>It may seem overly predictable. The local college with the highest ranking in Tuesday&#8217;s U.S. News &amp; World Report&#8217;s &#8220;Best Colleges&#8221; list touts the success, the one with the lowest local ranking questions the system.</p><p>But the release of what is almost certainly the nation&#8217;s most publicized college rankings raises a broader question: What do these rankings really tell prospective students?</p><p>The University of Scranton ranked 6th, highest among local institutions in the 2017 U.S. News list, and President Kevin Quinn issued a statement expressing pleasure that the U is &#8220;counted so consistently among the best colleges in the nation.&#8221;</p><p>Wilkes University ranked 85th, lowest among local schools, and university President Patrick Leahy cautioned that rankings miss critical data regarding which students a school accepts &#8212; a factor that, statistically, can have a big impact on the metrics U.S. News does count, such as student retention and graduation rates.</p><p>Half of Wilkes&#8217; undergraduates are first-generation college students, and 43 percent of freshman are eligible for federal Pell grants given to the most financially strapped, Leahy said.</p><p>&#8220;We have a very diverse and very financially needy student population,&#8221; Leahy said, and studies show such students often require more attention and time. But serving those students &#8220;has been our mission for 83 years.&#8221;</p><p>Locally, all ranked institutions were in a category U.S. News dubs &#8220;Regional Universities North,&#8221; essentially covering states from Maryland and Pennsylvania to Maine. Locally, between Scranton and Wilkes, Misericordia was 44th, Marywood University 51st and King&#8217;s College 57th.</p><p>Which isn&#8217;t a bad showing. Consider a few other fairly well-known Pennsylvania institutions on the list: Slippery Rock ranked 75th, Shippensburg was 95th, and Bloomsburg was 104th.</p><p>U.S. News also issues a list of best &#8220;national universities,&#8221; and Princeton topped that list for the sixth year in a row. The University of Pennsylvania was the only Keystone State school to crack the top ten, tied with Duke University for eighth place. Penn State University ranked 50th.</p><p>The U.S. News rankings may get the most attention annually, but it&#8217;s hardly the only system in town.</p><p>&#8220;Basically it has become a parlor game to have rankings, so everyone has a ranking,&#8221; Leahy said. &#8220;I think any ranking that adequately takes into consideration those students you chose to educate, and what you do with those students, is welcome.&#8221;</p><p>Leahy pointed to 2015 rankings by The Economist &#8212; the magazine&#8217;s first college rankings since founded in 1843. It used newly-available federal data on graduate earnings to determine a &#8220;return on investment&#8221; for students, and Wilkes did quite well.</p><p>&#8220;We ranked 25th in the nation,&#8221; Leahy said.</p><p>Leahy pointed to another problem with U.S. News rankings: Nearly a quarter of a school&#8217;s score is based on surveys of what officials from other schools think about yours. If they barely know your school, they are likely to use past rankings to judge.</p><p>&#8220;You can see how circular that can become,&#8221; Leahy said.</p><p>Misericordia University President Thomas Botzman agreed. In a release boasting of Misericordia&#8217;s climb of 23 spaces since 2007, the university noted that many peers surveyed for the U.S. News rankings &#8220;are located far outside the region and might not know Misericordia as well as they could.&#8221;</p><p>Misericordia pointed to a rating by The Princeton Review that put it among Northeastern United States&#8217; best. Those ranking were based on &#8220;excellent academics&#8221; and surveys of student opinion about campus life.</p><p>Yet in a column that appeared in the Times Leader in August, Botzman took issue with ratings by Forbes magazine that graded schools on financial well being, giving Misericordia a B-minus. He contended the assumptions used by Forbes may have been suitable for, say, Princeton, but didn&#8217;t really apply to much smaller schools like Misericordia.</p><p>Leahy stressed there&#8217;s a lot of valuable data used in the U.S. News rankings, but that it&#8217;s likely a mistake to use them as a sole, or even primary, way of gauging any school.</p><p>&#8220;I want to make clear that we&#8217;re not trying to be defensive here,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If there are best practices in higher education that help us improve our retention and graduation rates, I want to know about them. And I&#8217;m not debunking the work of the schools that are ranked ahead of us.</p><p>&#8220;There are others who feel strongly about these rankings,&#8221; Leahy added, &#8220;and part of my argument is that someone needs to speak up and say to those individuals that they are not looking at the full picture.&#8221;</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Mark Guydish</p><p>mguydish@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges”? Maybe not so much, locals say.