Every day, a professor opens a sophomore's eyes to a new reading of a classic poem, a lab technician builds a unique research instrument, and a graduate student, with the power of fresh insight, stuns a seminar.
Every month, faculty lecture at distinguished universities, students win prestigious national fellowships, and staff receive recognition from professional associations.
Every year, near the end of the second semester, faculty, staff and students collect awards for their contribution to KU's culture of excellence.
The intellectual energy and personal pride generated by all these activities come to characterize our university. KU is a great university and it shows.
But how do we measure how "great" it can become? Is it enough to say to ourselves and to our public, "This is a great place. Trust me. KU is really something special?" When we make this kind of assertion, without hard evidence, we are accused of boosterism.
Such skeptics have a point. No matter how great KU is, it can always become a "greater" university. But how do we measure the ways it becomes greater? Which improvements will provide the greatest value, and convince others that our pride in KU is valid? In short, how do we prove to the world we are as good as we think we are? And, put another way, how much do we need to improve to justify our pride?
A university marshals evidence of its excellence by comparing itself with others. When universities of a similar type are compared across a wide number of performance measures, it becomes relatively easy to place them in rank order. This happens when a university is "ranked."
Some university rankings are meaningful and some are not. Ranking science faculty success in competing for federal research funds is meaningful. Playboy's unscientific ranking of campus parties is not.
KU is often compared to other members of the Big XII Athletic Conference, not just in football or basketball rankings, but also in everything from athletic budgets, to faculty salaries, to per capita expenditures for students.
For the last twenty-five years, the Kansas Board of Regents has mandated that KU compare itself to five "peer" institutions-Oregon, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Colorado, and Iowa. The comparisons over that period demonstrate how well KU has kept up with its peers, and how well Kansas has matched funding with other states.
Because we are one of 34 public members of the American Association of Universities, we are frequently compared to the great public universities of the AAU-Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, Chapel Hill. Because we are one of the 125 universities with a medical school, we frequently are compared with the others who train doctors.
Rankings of universities have become a cottage industry in American journalism. The most popular rankings are from U.S. News & World Report, which ranks universities by size and mission across a complex of factors ranging from admission criteria to academic reputation to student-faculty ratios, to faculty salaries and alumni support. (KU's academic reputation ranks 30th; its overall ranking is 41st.)
The U.S. News rankings get a lot of attention, but there are literally scores of other rankings of all types. Kiplinger's Magazine ranks the "100 Best Buys" among public universities (KU is 28th). The New York Times, building on the rating scale for restaurants, gives universities one to five stars for their over-all success. (KU gets four stars.)
Many individual areas of study, such as Public Administration programs, provide an annual ranking by discipline. The U.S. Government provides a ranked list of 300 universities, based on the amount of federal grants and contracts each secures. The National Research Council ranked graduate programs by disciplines in 1992 and has begun planning to do the same again. Business Week ranks MBA programs nationally by comparing average starting salaries for recent MBA graduates.
My personal belief is that university rankings are proxies for quality. KU Public Administration professor George Frederickson makes the point that rankings do not really rank quality, they rank impressions of quality: "Rankings are, in fact, surrogates for quality, used in the absence of any reliable way to measure quality." He adds, "Rankings can also be genuine, objective comparisons of the effectiveness of institutions, assuming reliable data and that the assumptions built into ranking criteria are reasonable. But rankings, like most things, can be well or poorly done."
All of this bears upon the goal I have tried to articulate to express KU's pride and potential. As many of you have heard me say, KU's goal is to be one of the 25 best public universities in the country by 2010. Assuming that KU continues the steady march toward greater excellence that has characterized its growth over the past few years, how will we know when this "top 25" goal is achieved? U.S. News for the last decade has ranked KU somewhere between 30 and 42 on the list of public universities, depending on how generous our legislature was in that particular year. Will we all wake up some morning and find that U.S. News & World Report has anointed us one of the top twenty-five?
The answer is 'no.' We are not going to tie ourselves to any one measure of KU's quality. We know we will always be at a disadvantage in the U.S. News rankings because our admission standards are relatively modest, a legacy of Kansas populism. But we also know that we have many departments and
programs ranked in the "top 25" of individual disciplines-see below for a list of KU rankings-and we know how rapidly we have risen in various rankings that depend upon the quality of faculty. Becoming a "top 25" university will be achieved when we rank highly in a number of rankings, and when there is a general consensus that KU is one of the 25 best.
In the meantime, we can feel proud of our improved rankings. KU has risen from 63rd to 51st in federal grant expenditures over the last three years, meaning that KU faculty are becoming increasingly successful in the competition for federal research funds. In fact, KU's ascension on this list has been sharper than all but one other university in the country, one reason why a recent book, The Rise of the American Research Universities by Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond, lists KU as one of the 19 "rising stars" of American research universities.
When one looks at all the ways that KU is compared and ranked, it is easy to see why the "Top 25" status is a reasonable goal. All these measures demonstrate that KU faculty and staff have significantly enhanced the quality of education at KU, and the university has come to be identified as a rapidly improving institution. In the end, that is the internal value of all the rankings and comparisons.
But what is the external value of "top 25" status? Students at a "top 25" university get a closer look from employers. They also tend to receive more graduate fellowships and quicker acceptance to medical school and law school, assuming that they have done well on national tests. NIH and NSF expect more from research proposals from such schools, because they know that faculty will have the means to complete the grant. Newspapers consult professors at "top 25" schools. The citizens of Kansas, proud of KU's status, are more inclined to support its budget, if they know KU compares well nationally.
Kansas citizens want to know, is KU improving? Is the quality of the institution being enhanced for students and the public it serves? The answer is a proud "yes," and there are many rankings to prove the assertion. There is also the testimony of our students and their success in the workplace. The rankings provide self-esteem, but they also confirm that KU is a great university on its way to becoming even greater. We shouldn't be afraid to celebrate that achievement, and we should pursue the goals that such success makes possible.
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