Rank Pride

*Note: this transcript is from the original show broadcast. There may be slight differences from the rebroadcast.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. Last month, President Obama announced his plans to improve the affordability and accessibility of a college degree.

BARACK OBAMA: At the time when higher education has never been more important, college has never been more expensive.

PETER: He pointed to the skyrocketing cost of college. In the past three decades, it has risen, on average, more than 1,000%. But don’t get too nostalgic for the old days. Just consider what it was like for the students who attended college 200 years ago.

CAROLINE WINTERER: There were so many students who absolutely hated it. They just couldn’t stand learning all this Greek and Latin. It was torture.

MALE SPEAKER: So what did those young men do to keep their spirits up? They would shoot at each other. Luckily, weapons were so primitive they rarely hit each other.

PETER: A history of higher education, today on BackStory.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hello.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: In 1910, a bunch of graduate school deans convened a meeting to talk shop. On the agenda was one especially tricky issue– how to gauge the quality of the undergraduate schools who were sending them students for their graduate programs.

PETER: Their solution sounds pretty simple to us today, but at the time it was radical. A ranking system for all the nation’s colleges and universities. The deans wanted this ranking to make a difference, so they turned for help to the US government. A Bureau of Education official named Kendrick Babcock was given the job of putting it all together, and Babcock took up the project with a vengeance.

MALE SPEAKER: Its service will be nationwide. One standard will be applied to all. Its chief instruments will be impartiality, insight, and publicity.

BRIAN: The following year, Babcock completed his survey. He had created a five tier ranking of 344 schools. But before the report could be released, it was leaked to the public.

Michael Sauder is a University of Iowa sociologist who studies college rankings, and he says the response from college administrators was fast and furious.

MICHAEL SAUDER: I mean, nobody wanted to be in the fourth tier, and there were some lower ranked schools that just wanted to be left out altogether.

MALE SPEAKER: We had an earnest protest against such publications of the kind under discussion, and earnestly request that our institutions be omitted from any similar publications in the future.

PETER: This is a letter from the president of the low ranked Mississippi agricultural and mechanical college writing on behalf of 10 schools in his region. But it wasn’t just bottom tier schools who objected. Syracuse University had been placed in the second tier, and its chancellor pointed out that that guy doing the ranking had never actually set foot on the Syracuse campus.

BRIAN: Which was true. Despite his high minded intentions, Babcock’s methodology left a little to be desired. The entire ranking was based on hearsay from people at the grad schools themselves, the very people who commissioned the survey in the first place.

MICHAEL SAUDER: Basically what he did is he visited the most prestigious schools that granted graduate degrees and had informal discussions with administrators about what they thought of the schools that these students were coming from.

PETER: You’ll remember that this was a government report, but that doesn’t mean it was confined to some back office of a federal building. No, this controversy made its way all the way up to the White House. In 1912, under tremendous pressure from disgruntled schools, President William Howard Taft issued an executive order banning the ranking’s publication.

MICHAEL SAUDER: Taft basically said, OK, let’s not release it. Woodrow Wilson’s coming into office here next, and he was president of Princeton University. He said, I’ll just pass the buck onto Wilson and let him decide.

BRIAN: But either because of or despite his academic pedigree, the new president wasn’t interested in stirring up a hornet’s nest. Wilson, too, kept it under wraps. The government’s foray into the rankings game was over before it had really even started. And that’s how things remained for 100 years. Until now.

BARACK OBAMA: We’re going to start rating colleges not just by which college is the most selective.

PETER: Last month, President Obama unveiled a comprehensive series of higher ed reforms designed to address skyrocketing tuition rates and the student loan crisis. Part of his plan includes a brand new ranking system.

BARACK OBAMA: What we want to do is rate them on who’s offering the best value so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck.

BRIAN: If this ranking ever does see the light of day, we can be sure that it, too, will ruffle a few feathers. And that, says Michael Sauder, is because we’ve never really agree on what value in higher ed really means.

MICHAEL SAUDER: The value of a university degree is very difficult to rank. It might well be unrankable.