Assign a ranking to a university, US News & World Report has found out, and you're bound to raise some ire. This week, Yahoo Internet Life is making the same discovery. The magazine attempted to rank America's "100 Most Wired Colleges" in its May issue. But university technology directors are complaining that the methodology and the criteria were all wrong.
"We were happy with the fact that we were in the top 20. We were very flattered," says Martin Ringle, director of Computing & Information Services at Reed College. "But as far as the method of making assessment, I think it could have been done better."
The Yahoo story surveyed 300 colleges on issues such as hardware and wiring, student online services, and social use of the Internet. The Number One school was - surprise - MIT. But soon after the survey came out, liberal arts college mailing lists began to buzz with angry information technology directors who claim they were never asked to give the proper information for their universities. Even some universities that did get into the top 100 - such as Reed - complain that the information was fallacious.
"My sense is that they don't really understand higher education," says David Smallen, the Information Services director for wired-up Hamilton College, which ended up being left out. "They're doing a technology survey and didn't call the technology departments! They just called any old number they could get their hands on."
Other complaints include the criteria that Yahoo used for judging what's wired and what isn't - as Ringle points out, a student's ability to register online may be important at an oversized university, but at a tiny college like Reed, registration is done in highly personal meetings. Similarly, the availability of online gaming may not be as important as whether the Internet is used in the classroom as a teaching tool.
"If you're going to do a survey," Ringle notes, "you've got to look at what's going to benefit the students' education, not just whether it's the latest whiz-bang technology."
Yahoo, however, asserts that their methodology was sound, that they contacted the appropriate university officials, and that those who are complaining should look a little closer to home before they assign blame to Yahoo for inaccurate statistics.
"I know that sometimes the left hand doesn't know that the right hand is doing [at universities]," says Dina Gan, the Yahoo editor who coordinated the project. "But it's unfair to criticize a survey because they are missing the ball on their end administratively."
Furthermore, Yahoo answers the complaints about the criteria for being "wired" by pointing out that the academic aspects of technology were weighted more heavily than the social criteria.
The Yahoo battle feeds into the larger ongoing battle between universities and colleges and the publications that make money ranking them. Parents love rankings; universities feel they are forced, and prefer more general information resources. For example, a highly acclaimed yearly study by Kenneth Green (who gave Yahoo a tutorial for its project) already examines technology integration at 660 major American universities - but refrains from rating them.
Says Gan, "When it suits their purposes, universities like rankings, but when it doesn't, they don't."
