Andy McCollough, associate provost at the University of Florida (UF), said the U.S. News rankings of online college programs were “messy” after the school was ranked alongside Pace University, Florida Institute of Technology, and Westfield.
“It’s a good start, [but] it’s a very difficult task,” McCollough told The Gainesville Sun, adding that the lists didn’t take into account the many areas of focus within UF’s undergraduate programs.
U.S. News also came under scrutiny for focusing its results on “inputs to the educational experience” rather than outcomes like student graduation rates, average grades, and student satisfaction with their school’s online college programs.
“With the focus on outcomes by accreditors, the Department of Education, and institutions, this seems like a major problem,” Poulin wrote.
U.S. News, on its website, said the publication’s editors “analyzed the quantity and quality of data collected to determine which questions could be used for rankings” once they had received responses to their survey from colleges and universities.
Poulin took issue with the magazine’s strategy.
“Instead of focusing on a few pre-tested questions that would lead to assessing quality, the survey was a smorgasbord of questions that they decided whether or not to use in the end,” he wrote. “That’s a fairly disrespectful use of staff time at our nation’s colleges and universities. Also, institutional personnel could have suffered from survey fatigue and not answered some questions—only to learn later that they skipped a crucial question.”
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