Picky, picky, picky: ranking graduate schools of social work by student selectivity.

AMERICANS ARE UNDENIABLY fascinated by ranking. We seem to rank everything. Some rankings are trivial (e.g., the best-dressed or richest person); some merely note successful marketing (e.g., the best-selling car, bar of soap, or book). Other rankings have substantive implications for social policy (by identifying, e.g., the poorest counties, areas of the highest rates of unemployment, child maltreatment, or crime).

Higher education is no stranger to these listings, both trivial (e.g., best party school) and otherwise (e.g., Fogg, 2007; Goldin, 2006). Frequent articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education report the ranking of universities and colleges by the size of their endowments, extent of their library holdings, amount of funded research, number of National Merit scholars enrolled, number of Nobel laureates in residence, productivity of the faculty, and the prowess of the athletic teams, among many other characteristics (see, e.g., Walters, 2006). Academic journals in many fields also publish articles that rank academic programs (see, e.g., Wasley, 2007). Equally frequent are controversies about rankings, particularly those published annually by U.S. News & World Report (USNWR; see, e.g., Farrell & Van der Werf, 2007; Finder, 2007; Hoover, 2007; Manion, 2007; McGuire, 2007; Van der Werf, 2007a).

These rankings of universities as a whole and of their various academic departments and schools have several functions. Two of the most important are to serve as measures of performance and as methods of attracting resources. However crude, imprecise, and controversial, rankings suggest how well a university or program is doing compared with others. Governing boards, alumni, and university administrators all want to know how well an institution is performing in relation to its competitors (Farrell & Van der Weft, 2007). National rankings have a way of cutting through the rhetoric of institutional public relations with stark seemingly objective measures. These indicators of performance are then used by institutions (prominently, of course, by those highly ranked) to acquire scarce resources, to recruit the best students and faculty, to solicit gifts from donors, and, by public universities, to assure state legislators that public funds are being spent wisely and effectively (Farrell & Van der Werf, 2007).

Graduate schools of social work have been at this ranking game for three decades, starting with an article by Jayratne (1979) that ranked schools according to the number of articles published in selective social work journals. Since then, dozens of studies have ranked schools by article counts, including quite recent publications (e.g., Green & Baskind, 2007; Ligon, Jackson, & Thyer, 2007). All of these studies have been conducted by social work faculty, and they often generate controversy (e.g., Singer, 2007). In the late 1990s a different approach to ranking was taken by USNWR, which ranked schools of social work using chiefly the reputation of the program (as that was judged by a nonrandom sample of school deans or directors and a few senior faculty). Although there is general agreement that article productivity and reputation are different phenomena, there is some disagreement about the extent to which they produce similar school rankings, with Kirk and Corcoran (1995) and Green, Baskind, Fassler, & Jordan (2006) emphasizing the similarities between productivity- and reputation-based rankings and Feldman (2006) the differences. What has been apparent for many years, however, is that the choice of what to measure (e.g., time period, journals selected, manner of partial credit among coauthors, whether per capita or total faculty publications are considered, and how to list schools that tie for a particular rank) affects the final rankings that are produced (Corcoran & Kirk, 1990).

Ranking of Rankings

In 2006 the Journal of Social Work Education published a very useful summary of the literature on social work school ranking by Ronald Feldman (2006). Feldman, the former dean of the School of Social Work at Columbia University, asked "Who is number one?" Following a careful compilation of existing studies and various measures that were published between 1990 and 2003, he answered, "Columbia University." Primarily, Feldman focused on discrepancies across schools between the composite measure of faculty productivity that he developed and the reputation-based rankings offered by USNWR. He concluded that faculty productivity and reputation are separate and distinct phenomena (p. 500) and not necessarily the most important gauges of success for all schools. He suggested that multidimensional measures of school performance are needed that would encompass "the different missions and priorities of different schools of social work" (p. 500). He cautioned that "the utility of a single multidimensional measure would be of questionable value for determining the overall stature and standing of any given school of social work" (p. 500).

Feldman recommended that future efforts take into consideration a range of variables that might affect a school's stature, such as effectiveness of teaching and the career accomplishments of its graduates. He also noted that rankings of academic social work programs have largely neglected such variables as level of research funding, rates of student retention, and selectivity in admissions. He encouraged future studies to "employ such objectively measurable variables" (p. 501).