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US News & World Report: In its 1998 ranking of colleges and universities, US News & World Report lists the University of Oregon as an unranked "third tier" institution. This designation is based on the following categories of evaluation: Academic Reputation (25%): This subjective category is determined by surveying administrative officials at each school. Administrators evaluate schools in their own category on a scale from one to four. It is worth noting that only sixty-two percent of the respondents solicited returned the reputational survey. This is one of the evaluative categories Gerhard Casper objected to in his letter to US News editor James Fallows. Retention (25%): Two components contribute to this scoring category: graduation rates, which count for eighty percent of the score; and freshman retention rates, which make up the remaining twenty percent of the category. The graduation rate is based on the percentage of a class that graduates in six years or less; the freshman retention rate is calculated according to the average proportion of freshmen who return the following fall. UO scored high in freshman retention rates - we retain on average a remarkable eighty-four percent of our freshmen. In the category of graduation rates, UO may not have performed so well - but as Gerhard Casper points out, a weak performance in this category may indicate a range of attributes of a given university that are not negative but positive. The graduation rate may be low because the institution is rigorous. In addition, the six-year evaluation period does not account for part-time students. Faculty Resources (20%): This figure represents the resources that institutions devote to instruction. It is based on five components: class size, faculty salaries, faculty degrees, student-to-faculty ratio, and proportion of full-time faculty. UO performed well in class-size and student-to-faculty ratio categories; but like most public universities, UO has faced budget cuts that have limited faculty salaries and the proportion of full-time faculty. What's more, US News does not take into consideration the research-to-salary component that some guides assess. If they did, they would note that UO's faculty out-produces comparable institutions consistently. Student Selectivity (15%): Four components make up this attribute: test scores, high school class standing, acceptance rate, and yield. Like most public institutions, student selectivity is less stringent at the University of Oregon than it is at many private institutions - an indication of the university's dedication to serving a broad community of students from a wide cross-section of society. In consequence, UO performs poorly in this category. Financial Resources (10%): This category represents the total resources a school dedicates to education, making a distinction between educational expenses and other expenses. We might call this the "more is better" category. Again, like most public institutions, the UO has faced budget cuts throughout the last decade, hindering our assessment in this category. According to the Fiske Guide, however, UO has done an exceptional job of making the most of what resources we do have available. Value Added (5%): This attribute seeks to quantify the school's role in the academic success of its students. To do so, the editors arrive at a predicted rate of graduation for each school, then compare that rate with the actual graduation rate for that school. The "Value Added" category is perhaps the most mysterious of those employed by US News. It is not clear what this category seeks to measure, and again seems to penalize schools with high academic standards. Alumni Giving Rate (5%): This figure measures the average percentage of undergraduate alumni who give to the school during the most recent academic year. The rate of giving is seen to represent a measure of graduate satisfaction.
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