The Validity of the 2004 U.S. News & World Report's Rankings of Schools of Social Work

Surprisingly, the only systematic comparative evaluations of the educational quality of the social work profession s graduate schools have been conducted by U.S. News & World Report (USNWR).This well-known news service released its first assessment of MSW programs in 1994, and on two subsequent occasions, in 2000 and 2004, reassessed the quality of the graduate education those programs provided, and again published the resulting rankings (U. S. News & World Report, 1994, 2000, 2004). In the decade since the initial rankings, USNWR has made assessment of graduate and professional schools a signature component of its commercial enterprise and corporate identity. The importance of these rankings in social work, as well as in other professions and disciplines, has grown in an unprecedented and unexpected manner. USNWR has become a recognized icon within professional education. Results of the serial surveys commissioned by USNWR are marketed and disseminated relentlessly to public and professional audiences in book and Internet formats. More important, in the absence of evaluative studies by social work professional organizations or by educational institutions, the outcomes of these surveys influence educational decisions of prospective graduate students, occupational decisions of faculty members, and financial decisions of university and governmental administrators, donors, and funding agencies. To evaluate the educational programs of five other major professions--education, law, medicine, business, and engineering--USNWR relies on a particularly complex formula and assessment packages comprised of multiple objective and subjective indicators. Social work rankings, however, continue to be based entirely on survey responses to a single rating scale item. Deans and other selected administrators and faculty respondents evaluate Council on Social Work Education (CSWE)-accredited graduate programs by designating the educational quality of each as "poor," "marginal," "average," "good," or "distinguished. "This single question--with responses voluntarily returned by mail--determines the ranking of graduate schools of social by arguably one of the most influential news outlets in the country. Interestingly, challenges to USNWR rankings of various professional schools based on more comprehensive and sophisticated measurement packages have been far more frequent and vociferous in tone than those from social work. Although the former executive director of CSWE, the accrediting body for social work education, voiced concerns about the validity of the initial social work survey immediately following its release (Beless, 1994), social work administrators, practitioners, and scholars have been reticent, accommodating, and even supportive of USNWR evaluations in more recent years. As the immediate past president of CSWE recently explained: In the early 90s, when U.S. News and World Report decided to include MSW programs in the rankings, there was an immediate reaction from senior deans and the leadership of the Council on Social Work Education to boycott the survey. When the rankings were published, the deans representing the higher ranked programs switched their opposition and began to develop strategies to maintain the ranking. (Baskind, 2005, p. 1) In recent years the higher ranked schools have developed a custom of prominently displaying the computer graphic badges and icons developed and awarded by USNWR on their Web sites. And, USNWR rankings have become a recognized resource in the recruitment of students and faculty, in the preparation of annual performance reports, and in fundraising efforts for schools and departments of social work. The validity of USNWR's extraordinarily simple yet influential rating system is based on at least two central assumptions, neither of which has been systematically evaluated. …