Agreement on several fronts

At the end of the sessions on college rankings, Jeffrey Brenzel of Yale said that he, Robert Morse of U.S. News, and Richard Vedder of Ohio University, agreed on three points: that families need information and ways to compare colleges; that there are limits to a numerical ranking system; and that colleges have failed to provide enough comparable data to prospective students. He said that he also agreed with Vedder on a “do-it-yourself” rankings model where students could compare colleges based on the variables most important to them. Morse said that U.S. News is actually working on a do-it-yourself system.