Guided by the missions and visions, higher education institutions utilize benchmarking processes to identify better and more efficient ways to carry out their operations. Aside from the initial planning and organization steps involved in benchmarking, a matching or selection step is crucial for identifying other institutions that have good…

Educationalists are well able to find fault with rankings on numerous grounds and may reject them outright. However, given that they are here to stay, we could also try to improve them wherever possible. All currently published university rankings combine various measures to produce an overall score using an additive approach. The individual…

This paper engages two core ideas: first, that status mobility is facilitated through connectivity, or having a large number of ties to others, as suggested by theories of social capital and social networks; and second, that aggression is an expressive or irrational reaction to frustrations, humiliations, or social pathologies. In contrast, I…

The Top 100 degree tables published in this edition of Diverse, and the many more detailed tables included on the Diverse Web site, delineate the institutions that have conferred the most master's, doctoral and first professional degrees to students of color in academic year 2007-2008. Each table shows the number of degrees for a specific minority…

Viewbooks, rankings, and accountability measures cast colleges as distinctive and readily comparable. But the average student experience doesn't differ that markedly among institutions, according to this year's National Survey of Student Engagement. Rather, the survey found, more than 90 percent of the variation in educational quality occurs among…

Two surveys on how students choose a college are reported. Reputation is often the most powerful of all influence factors. Sources of first information about colleges are identified: friends, parents, college recruitment publications, college guide books, etc. The declining role of the high school counselor was noted. (MLW)

A 1981 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development seminar on strategies for developing the public image of higher education institutions was the forum for a survey of institutional efforts in 51 institutions, including public relations offices, formal fund-raising, alumni and student recruitment activities, communications efforts, and…

In this article, the author argues that American higher education is allowing itself to be held hostage by the rankings industry, which can lead institutions to consider actions harmful to the public interest and encourage the public's infatuation with celebrity at the expense of substance. Instead of sitting quietly by during the upcoming ratings…

Two representatives of popular magazines that publish controversial rankings of colleges and universities respond to criticism of the rankings. Issues addressed include the need for third-party comparisons, the importance of institutional reputation, cooperation with the higher education community, changing methodology, data integrity, reader…

Institutional research that focuses on professional development is addressed in 35 papers from the 1982 meeting of the North East Association for Institutional Research. Titles and authors include the following: "Modeling College Student Adjustment and Retention for the Individual Institution" (Norman D. Aitken); "The Development…