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The validity of the 2004 U.S. News & World Report's Rankings of Schools of Social Work: a response.

Article Excerpt
In their recent article in this journal, "The Validity of the 2004 U.S. News & World Report's Rankings of Schools of Social Work," Green and colleagues (2006) offered what they called empirical support for the rankings of the educational quality of the graduate schools of social work. Although rebutting the commercialism of the Report and its use of a single rating survey, the authors take great measures only to show that other objective variables of "program success" bear out those same commercialized ratings. Specifically, they used what they called the "traditional" measures that have been used over a long time, including admission selectivity, faculty publication, and the longevity of the program. In addition, they surveyed deans, directors, practitioners, graduate faculty, and graduate students. The authors asked respondents to rate only those schools with which they were familiar and consider their record of scholarship, curriculum, and quality of the faculty and the graduates. Their findings bore out the positive correlation between their objective measures and the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings.

Comparing ourselves with others is natural. We have been doing it since the beginning of time: warrior against warrior, man against woman, white against black. Indeed, there may be value in setting benchmarks or standards of excellence that guide our development. Yet, with the great personal respect I hold for the authors of the article, I wish to send up the flags of caution and challenge some of the assumptions of their work and the work of others who, de facto, have created a hierarchy of excellence that I think is suspect.

INHERENT PROBLEMS WITH REPUTATIONAL STUDIES

First, let me point out that the authors' own text indicates that those surveyed should only evaluate the "schools" with which they were familiar. In fact, the USNWR purports to rank only the master's degree programs, not the schools. From reading the promotional materials of the highly ranked schools, one would not know that only the master's program is ranked. Rather, those materials more likely generalize those findings to the entire...

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