November-December 2008

Rcently Samford University’s communication’s office was surprised by a call from the local newspaper. “Have you seen the latest rankings?” asked the reporter. We confessed that we hadn’t. “Samford is ranked 27th in the nation in a report being released by Forbes magazine this month.” The university quickly mobilized to find out how we had earned such an unexpected honor.

The rankings published by Forbes were developed by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP).  They were released for the first time this year, and Samford’s inclusion in the top 30 of “National Universities” is bound to be used as evidence of the study’s unreliability. After all, the most common question I get when introducing myself at conferences is, “How are things in Palo Alto?”—at which I have to mouth the word “SAM-ford” very distinctly so as not to be confused with Stanford.  Although we are the largest privately supported institution in Alabama, our distinguished academic achievements aren’t even well-recognized in the state—a part of the country where varsity athletes are infinitely more sought after than valedictorians.

To borrow a sports metaphor, Samford’s ranking in the top 30 is a monumental upset.  We are a rung above the University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley Nobel Prize winners = 20; Samford = 0).  Of the five contiguous states in our region (Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida), only Georgia had a school ranked higher than Samford (Emory University).  The cost of attendance at Samford is approximately $20,000 less than that of most of the schools above us on the list.

Even more startling than Samford’s high ranking is the disparity between the CCAP ranking and the better-known one in U.S. News and World Report. Most of the schools ranked fairly similarly in the two reports. Harvard moved from second to first. Southern Methodist jumped up from 67th to 13th. But no school had anywhere near the 91 point jump that Samford enjoyed.

Actually, our ranking as 118th in the U.S. News rankings had been a cause for celebration, because it was the first time we had been considered under our new Carnegie classification as a “doctoral research university.” We do not offer a single Ph.D. degree at Samford, but we do offer research degrees in our Divinity School and in the School of Education, which resulted in our new classification. We expected to appear near the bottom of the list, so it was an honor to be listed next to major national research universities such as Arizona State (ASU enrollment = 63,000; SU enrollment = 4,500).

The CCAP group professes a noble goal: to evaluate schools on how well they educate their students instead of according to the kind of students they recruit. As Richard Vedder, Daniel Bennett, and Robert Villwock explain:

"We at CCAP have long complained that most rankings of colleges are largely based on inputs used in providing services, things like the faculty-student ratio or the average SAT score of entering students. Better would (sic) to evaluate schools on either consumer satisfaction (like we evaluate most other things) or on the post-graduate achievements of the products of the education—the alumni." (A New Way to Evaluate College Performance, March 28, 2008, http://collegeaffordability.blogspot.com)

For those of us without billion-dollar endowments or Ivy League reputations, these words certainly strike a pleasing chord. At Samford, we’ve always been proud of the individual attention we give to students and the high performance standards we maintain. Good teaching is labor-intensive. It requires dedication to the art and patience in helping all students, even those who aren’t naturally gifted. It means assigning lots of writing and consequently grading lots of papers. This is not the sort of thing one expects from research faculty at prestigious universities.

One result of all this sweat equity in our students is that they generally do quite well in their postgraduate experiences, and they tend to think fondly of their teachers and mentors. These are precisely the kinds of things that CCAP is trying to measure. But to determine the attitudes students have about their education, CCAP turns to RateMyProfessor.com, and they gauge graduates’ success through their appearance in Who’s Who in America.

RateMyProfessor is a notoriously flawed instrument for assessing student opinion.  Most of the faculty at Samford have had fewer than 10 student responses over the last five years, which represents only a small fraction of the students they have taught. Of those who do respond, some are clearly motivated by the low grades they have received. Our Faculty Senate even made this a matter of discussion last year in hopes there might be some way of mitigating the pernicious influence of this site. It seems ironic that we are now receiving national attention in part because we have had such favorable comments from students who responded to this dubious website.  

Who’s Who in America is certainly a more legitimate source than RateMyProfessor, but assessing reputation is a difficult business, and being listed in the directory is no guarantee that you are a luminary of the first order. Since revenue for Who’s Who comes in part from copies purchased by the recipients of this honor, it is in the publisher’s best interests to cast the net widely. This is not to say that Samford alumni haven’t done well; their accomplishments range from running Fortune 500 companies to singing at the Metropolitan Opera. But it could be that lots of Samford alumni just like to be listed in Who’s Who, for whatever reason.

Overall, the news of its place on the list was greeted with skepticism by Samford faculty and students. Many chimed in with the classic Groucho Marx line, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”  More significant to us (if less noticed by the public) is our rating in the National Survey of Student Engagement. We outperformed the average of our peer institutions in all five categories measured by NSSE. Although these scores are less sensational than the CCAP ranking, they are much more meaningful.

Just as some colleges have worked strategically to raise their U.S. News rankings, I suspect some are already calculating ways of moving up in subsequent CCAP reports. Given the small samples on RateYourProfessor, this would seem to be a fairly simple matter. One imagines RateYourProfessor mixers on campus where fawning professors chat up students before leading them to computers where they can enter scores that reflect their heartfelt appreciation. At the very least, professors might encourage students to enter a response on RateYourProfessor.com, the way hotel clerks ask you to fill out a comment card if you enjoyed your stay. Such admonitions right before the final exam would be particularly effective.

I anticipate, then, that Samford may fall like Icarus from the lofty heights it currently inhabits, a region that many feel is above its rightful sphere. If so, we will return to our mundane duties, plowing the fields of academe like one of Brueghel’s peasants. In the meantime, pardon us if we indulge in the heady delight of national recognition.

David Chapman has been dean of the Howard College of Arts and Sciences at Samford University since 2001. He joined Samford’s faculty in 1990 as an associate professor of English and director of Samford’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program. He had a key role in developing the university’s interdisciplinary core curriculum and helped coordinate its Problem-Based Learning Initiative (funded by a million-dollar grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts). He has published more than 50 articles and one book, The Power of Writing. 

Read Comments   |   Submit Your Comment