Making the grades.

• Author: Moore, Peter B.
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

It is amusing to see what happens when an organization other than U.S. News & World Report tries to rank U.S. institutions of higher education (The Washington Monthly College Guide, September). It seems to me that the product you are turning out would improve in quality if you took more care evaluating the data you use, especially the data on research.

Standards for reporting research funding vary from institution to institution. They do not all do it the same way. For example, Johns Hopkins always comes out at the head of the class with respect to research funding, which at first glance seems mysterious since it is a rather small university. Then you learn that Johns Hopkins runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. Does Johns Hopkins count as "research funding" the money it receives from NASA for running the facility that operates the telescope? I suspect that it does, but you need to find out before deciding how you are going to use the number you got for Johns Hopkins for ranking purposes.

Also, it is unclear to me that every university includes its medical school when reporting research funding, which is critical. The National Institutes of Health is the biggest single source of research funding in the country, and a lot of NIH money goes to medical schools, for obvious reasons. Neither Princeton nor Caltech have medical schools. Should both institutions be "penalized" for this in your rankings? Does it really affect the quality of the job they do for their students?

The scores you give institutions based on total research funding and number of Ph.D.s awarded also take no account of differences in institutional size. U.C. Berkeley is massively larger than Caltech, for example. Of course it raises more research dollars and produces more Ph.D.s every year. If you were to base your rankings on research dollars per faculty member and Ph.D.s per faculty member, you would discover that Mississippi State University is not superior to Caltech, contrary to your list. Everyone on the planet knows this without having to look it up. All you would have to do to verify this assertion is poll the faculties of the two institutions to find out what fraction of the faculty now at one of them would seriously consider a job proffered by the other.

Good luck with your rankings. I think it is great that someone is trying to evaluate institutions on the basis of what they contribute to the life of the country.

PETER B. MOORE

Sterling Professor of Chemistry

...