Citing relatively high levels of student debt and dissatisfaction with teaching quality, Forbes.com rated Dartmouth the 127th best college in America on Thursday in the publication's first foray into university rankings. Dartmouth, which received the lowest ranking in the Ivy League, was an exception among small colleges, which were generally rated highly in the report.
The rankings come two weeks after Forbes released a report that Dartmouth graduates have the highest mid-career median incomes.
No College officials were available to comment on Thursday, Dartmouth spokesperson Genevieve Haas said. Attempts to reach officials separately by telephone were not successful.
"Based on the most recent data available from [Consortium on Financing Higher Education's] survey of the Class of 2006, 96.4 percent of Dartmouth graduates were very or generally satisfied with the quality of instruction at Dartmouth; 97.8 percent were very or generally satisfied with the out-of-class availability of faculty, and 92 percent were overall satisfied with their undergraduate experience," Haas said in an e-mailed statement to The Dartmouth.
Forbes, which worked with Ohio University professor Richard Vedder to devise the ranking system, released the information as an alternative to the annual U.S. News and World Report analysis, according to Michael Noer, executive editor of special projects at Forbes.com. Dartmouth was ranked 11th in last year's U.S. News rankings.
"We think ours is a very valid way of looking at the world," Noer said. "Competition in general is a good thing -- that the ratings game has been dominated by one publication for so long I think is actually a bad thing."
Vedder was travelling and could not be reached for comment.
Noer said the methodology used in the Forbes.com rankings focused on student experience, rather than on institutions' reputations.
The rankings relied on five criteria, including the number of alumni listed in "Who's Who in America," student evaluations on Ratemyprofessors.com, four-year graduation rates, the number of alumni and faculty receiving national awards and the average amount of debt students accumulate over four years. The U.S. News analysis, in comparison, includes categories like student to faculty ratio, selectivity, acceptance rate and other more traditional indicators.
Princeton University was rated number one in the Forbes assessment, followed by the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Swarthmore College and Williams College. Yale University and Columbia University were ranked ninth and 10th, respectively, while Cornell University was 121st.
Dartmouth announced a series of financial aid reforms in January, eliminating tuition for families with incomes under $75,000, replacing loans with grants and implementing need-blind admissions for international students. These measures, College officials said, served to reduce graduates' accumulation of debt. Still, Noer explained that student debt set Dartmouth back in the Forbes.com ranking.
The College was also "hurt" by Ratemyprofessors.com, Noer said.
"Students did not feel [faculty] were doing as good as a job as [faculty at] some of the competing universities," he said.
In an article accompanying the rankings, Vedder and Noer wrote that Dartmouth, Cornell and several other traditionally top-tier schools, "may be living a bit off of their reputations."
"You have to think of this in a little context," Noer said. "Unlike U.S. News and World Report, we rank all sorts of schools together. Although 127 sounds bad and it is significantly worse than [the U.S. News rating], we were only ranking 596 colleges out of the over 4,000 in the country."
Noer discounted criticism that Ratemyprofessors.com is not a valid source of student sentiment, explaining that researchers have found a correlation between the web site reviews and course evaluations internal to colleges. The ranking also attempted to compensate for any effect academic rigor may have on the assessment, Noer said.
"In the perfect world, we would look at the actual evaluations from the schools themselves, but we don't have access to those," he said.
Academic scholarship on the accuracy of Ratemyprofessors.com, however, is mixed. Many students who rate their professors on the web site give high marks "when the professor is attractive and the course is easy," Central Michigan University professor James Felton and his colleagues wrote in a 2006 working paper examining the web site. This tendency makes it difficult to draw precise conclusions from the online assessments, the paper argues.
"Because student posts at Ratemyprofessors.com are voluntary, the sample in the study is self-selected and is limited by whatever variables determine who would take the trouble to post an evaluation at Ratemyprofessors.com," the authors wrote. "We would expect, for example, that posts might reflect relatively highly motivated students willing to take the time either to praise or blame professors who provided especially positive or negative experiences ... Some disgruntled and less competent students will use the site as a vehicle for retaliation."
While no Dartmouth organization tracks usage of Ratemyprofessors.com, interviews with several students suggest that undergraduates at the College do not frequently visit the site.
"I've never even heard of it," Bari Wien '10 said.
Students said they believed the Student Assembly Course Guide is a more accurate representation of the quality of Dartmouth professors.
