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The Bureau of Education's Suppressed Rating of Colleges, 1911–1912

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David S. Webster
David S. Webster*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

The earliest academic quality ranking ever discussed by those few scholars who have written comprehensive reviews of such rankings was a 1925 rating of graduate departments in 20 disciplines at American Ph.D.-granting universities. It was published by Raymond M. Hughes in 1925. In actuality, academic quality rankings existed before then; as early as 1911, for example, the United States Bureau of Education produced one that stratified hundreds of American colleges and universities into five levels, according to their presumed quality. However, because a storm of protest led to this work's being suppressed before it was officially published, very little is known about it.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Winter 1984 , pp. 499 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

For their help I am grateful to Alexander Astin and Lorraine Mathies of UCLA; Frank Dickey of Lexington, Kentucky; Michael B. Katz of the University of Pennsylvania; Meyer Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; an anonymous History of Education Quarterly referee; and, especially, Richard Wayne Lykes of George Mason University. Any faults that remain are my responsibility.

1. Hughes, Raymond M., A Study of the Graduate Schools of America (Miami, Ohio, 1925).Google Scholar

2. Higgins, Arthur Steven, “The Rating of Selected Fields of Doctoral Study in the Graduate Schools of Education: An Opinion Survey,” Columbia University Teachers College Ed. D. dissertation, 1968, chapter 2, “The History of Graduate School Assessments,” pp. 8–55.Google Scholar

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4. Blackburn, Robert T. and Lingenfelter, Paul E., Assessing Quality in Doctoral Programs: Criteria and Correlates of Excellence (Ann Arbor, Center for the Study of Higher Education, 1973).Google Scholar

5. Godwin Wong, S., “Pecking Orders: Uses and Limitations,” presented at the 17th annual forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Montreal, Canada, May, 1977 (ED 146 861).Google Scholar

6. Lawrence, Judith K. and Green, Kenneth C., A Question of Quality: The Higher Education Ratings Game, American Association for Higher Education-ERIC Research Report no. 5 (Washington, D.C., 1980).Google Scholar

7. Smith, and Fiedler, , p. 225.Google Scholar

8. Blackburn, and Lingenfelter, , p. 3.Google Scholar

9. Lawrence, and Green, , p. 2 Google Scholar

10. Ibid., p. 4.Google Scholar

11. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1886–87 (Washington, D.C., 1888), p. 645.Google Scholar

12. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1888–89, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1891), p. 1070.Google Scholar

13. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1890–91, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1894), p. 831.Google Scholar

14. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1889–90, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1893), table 1, pp. 1572–73.Google Scholar

15. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1909, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1910), table 71, pp. 978–79.Google Scholar

16. For the last tables listing them, see the Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1910, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1911), table 60, 962–63 and table 61, pp. 964–65. After that report, the names of exclusively women's colleges and other colleges and universities were published together in a single, undifferentiated list, without any attempt to stratify them by quality.Google Scholar

17. In 1886–87, for example, only seven of the 159 women's colleges listed, or 4%, were placed in Division A. See the Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1886–87, ibid., table 42, Division A, p. 645 and table 42, Division B, pp. 646–655. By the Report for the year ending in June, 1910 (see n. 16, above), many women's colleges had closed, and some had been elevated to Division A, but still only 16 of the 108 women's colleges (15%) were placed in Division A.Google Scholar

18. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1911, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1912), p. 884.Google Scholar

19. Ibid. Google Scholar

20. Ibid. Google Scholar

21. Indeed, after this episode agencies of the federal government have very seldom sought to accredit and to publish multi-level stratifications of institutions of higher learning. Recently, in deciding which schools to certify as eligible to participate in programs involving veterans' allowances, federally insured student loans, and other public programs, the federal government has almost always refrained from making its own list of accredited institutions and depends mostly on the lists formulated by outside agencies.Google Scholar

22. See Claxton, Philander P., “An Explanatory Statement in Regard to ‘A Classification of Universities and Colleges with Reference to Bachelor's Degrees,”' no. 501 (Washington, D.C., 1912). It is reprinted in Lykes, Richard Wayne, Higher Education and the United States Office of Education (1867–1953) (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 227–237. The graduate deans’ reasoning was similar to that employed by the officers of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1908 when they engaged Abraham Flexner, who was not affiliated with any medical school, to study medical education in America, Canada, and Newfoundland.Google Scholar

23. Kelly, Fred J., Frazier, Benjamin W., McNeely, John H., and Ratcliffe, Ella B., Collegiate Accreditation by Agencies within States, Bulletin 1940, no. 3 (Washington, D.C., 1940), p. 17.Google Scholar

24. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1911 , vol. 2, ibid., pp. 43–44.Google Scholar

25. Babcock, Kendric Charles, “A Classification of Universities and Colleges with Reference to Bachelor's Degrees” (Washington, D.C., 1911). It is reprinted in Lykes, , p. 214.Google Scholar

26. Babcock, , reprinted in Lykes, , p. 216.Google Scholar

27. Ibid. Google Scholar

28. Ibid. Google Scholar

29. Ibid. Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 215.Google Scholar

31. Zook, George F. and Haggerty, M.E., The Evaluation of Higher Institutions. I. Principles of Accrediting Higher Institutions (Chicago, 1936), p. 21.Google Scholar

32. Claxton, , reprinted in Lykes, , pp. 232–33.Google Scholar

33. Quoted in Lykes, , p. 50. Lykes has pointed out that Hardy, although professing “sympathy with the great work of the U.S. Department of Education,” was unable to get the name of that organization right. Since 1870, it had been called the U.S. Bureau of Education. (Richard Wayne Lykes, personal communication to the author, May 29, 1981.) Google Scholar

34. Lykes, , pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

35. Claxton, , reprinted in Lykes, , p. 233.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p. 231. At least, this was Claxton's public posture. In notes that he prepared many years later for a biographer's use, he wrote about the uproar caused by this classification, “the trouble was … [that the classification] was too nearly correct.” See Lewis, Charles Lee, Philander Priestley Claxton: Crusader for Public Education (Knoxville, 1948), p. 173.Google Scholar

37. Claxton, , reprinted in Lykes, , p. 234.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., p. 233.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 235.Google Scholar

40. Lykes, , p. 50.Google Scholar

41. Dickey, Frank, personal communication to the author, March 19, 1981.Google Scholar

42. Lykes, , p. 51.Google Scholar

43. Saunders, J.B., “The United States Office of Education and Accreditation,” in Blauch, Lloyd E. (ed.), Accreditation in Higher Education (Washington, D.C., 1959), p. 18.Google Scholar

44. Capen, Samuel P., “College ‘Lists’ and Surveys Published by the Bureau of Education,” School and Society (6), July 14, 1914, p. 39.Google Scholar

45. Smyser, William Craig, “Our First Fifty Years,” in Constance, Clifford L. (comp. by), Historical Review of the Association (n.p., 1972), p. 11.Google Scholar

46. Patrick Dolan, W., The Ranking Game: The Power of the Academic Elite (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1976), p. 26.Google Scholar