HoustonWave wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 2:47 pm
Mr. Blowhard surfaces again. He keeps making speeches and writing op-eds as though anyone would pay any attention to him. It’s not surprising that he would want to end the USN&WR rankings, since we fell so far in those rankings during his tenure at Tulane—heaven forbid any measures or accountability. Cowen is an embarrassment to higher education in general, and to Tulane University in particular. I guess his next op-ed will be his ideas on university budget reforms—what a clown he is.
To be fair, US News ranking variables have a significant impact on how Tulane recruits students and which students enroll. As has been established through viewing various third party studies on the incomes of families in regard to colleges, Tulane is known as an institution that provides large "merit" scholarships to students with high ACT/SAT from wealthy families in order to entice them to attend Tulane when they would be admitted but not receive a scholarship at (arguably) more well regarded universities that primarily only give need based aid (i.e. Ivies, Stanford, MIT, etc.). Tulane cares about those high scores since it impacts Tulane's US News rank, however, if the US News wasn't so influential and high profile universities avoided it, Tulane could take a more wholistic approach to recruiting students and there would certainly be more economic diversity at Tulane.
Basically, he has a valid point - especially for an institution like Tulane that spends a lot of scholarship resources on merit scholarships to convince wealthy students to attend for the purposes of (legally) buying high scores solely for the purposes of college ranking systems - but it's probably falling of deaf ears.
EDIT - Also, people can blame him for Tulane's fall in ranking, but Tulane does not have the endowment to compete at that level and it exists in a state that, to put it politely, does not emphasize the value of either education or research.