GAMING THE RANKINGS BY MEI CORRICELLO AND MYLES KIM
Stanford Recruits
Princeton: Rank #1
#6 k n a rd: R o f n a St
Northeastern: Rank #49
Anton Ouyang, Golf
Clarem Rank # ont McKenna 8 Liber al Arts :
UIUC : Rank #47
Crystal Qian, Fencing Sports Section Read more on page 14
Urinals need dividers, now BY ANIRUDH SESHADRI
C
ollege education has always been synonymous with social mobility. With more than 4,000 accredited higher education institutions in the U.S., �inding the right one can seem like �inding a needle in a haystack — and that’s where college rankings come in. Rankings from U.S. News, Forbes and Times Higher Education impact student decisions and higher education institution admissions. As these rankings gain popularity as ways for students to weed out the best schools, many colleges have discovered loopholes to climb toward the top. According to David Webster, the author of Academic Quality Rankings of American Colleges and Universities, rankings can generally be de�ined as a list of the best colleges and universities according to the creators’ interpretation. Rankings can be used to compare individual departments within a college or university and measure the quality of an institution holistically; there are separate rankings for graduate education. College rankings are either based on outcomes or reputations. Outcomebased rankings use data about a student’s post-graduate success — with differing methodologies — to approximate the quality of the education at that school. Reputational rankings are based on peer review and focus on the institution’s reputation over the prominence of graduates.
L Between 1910 and the 1960s, the quality of colleges was most frequently judged through their education of distinguished persons. The �irst outcomebased rankings were published by James Mckeen Cattel, a psychologist who studied eminent men. The �irst methodology for reputational-based rankings was developed in 1925 by Raymond Hughes, a chemistry professor at Miami University in Ohio. Reputational-based rankings would become the dominant form of academic quality rankings starting in 1959, paving the way for the U.S. News’s debut. U.S. News published its �irst reputationalbased college rankings in 1983. In their �irst three years, they provided college and university presidents with a list of schools similar to their own and asked each to choose the �ive schools they felt provided the best undergraduate education. Beginning in 1988, U.S. News started publishing annual rankings and made changes to their methodology after academics criticized the reputation-based
rankings. Afterward, U.S. News started to include opinions of school faculty and decreased the reputational component to 25% of the overall ranking, with the remaining 75% for data determined by admissions selectivity, faculty strength, educational resources and graduation rates, similar to the criteria used today. Since then, outlets have constantly tweaked their methodologies to better capture what they feel makes a college great. The popularity of the U.S. News rankings led to the creation of other rankings, most notably The Princeton Review in 1992 and Forbes in 2008. In-Depth Section Read more on page 11
ong before social distancing became common, it was already happening in boys’ bathrooms. Uncomfortable faces looked furtively to identify the farthest vacant urinal as others quickly tried to �inish their business. One easy solution to resolving this awkward interaction in boys’ bathrooms is to install dividers between urinals. “Dividers would be good to add in boys bathrooms as it will give the privacy that people want,” senior Pranav Kartik said. The lack of dividers in boys’ bathrooms is a long unaddressed issue and pressures students to use only the corner urinals and individual stalls. These privacy concerns make the other urinals, which can number anywhere from four to eight, obsolete. Many students have tried to �igure out solutions to minimize the awkwardness without dividers, but most of the solutions involve avoiding using some of the urinals, causing long lines of students waiting to use the bathroom. “Everyone only uses alternate urinals, skipping the ones in between to not make it awkward,” junior Vachan Arora said. “Dividers would make those skipped urinals actually useful.” Since most of the bathrooms were built with the school in 1965, there are no urinal partitions between them. Opinion Section Read more on page 5