College rankings not worth the paper printed on

Every year I look forward to reading U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges" edition.

This venerable publication for years was considered the gold standard. If you were a college dean you wanted to make sure your school was on the right end of the right lists.

Schools like Harvard and Princeton and Williams and Brown always competed for bragging rights to hold the No. 1 spot respectively as the best university and the best liberal arts school.

You would expect the so called Ivy League schools to rank high. Right?

I mean, come on, Harvard is Harvard after all. Who wouldn't want to attend Harvard?

When I was making my choice to go to graduate school I took what U.S. News & World Report had to say very seriously. When I saw that Syracuse University was ranked No. 1 in broadcast journalism you bet that is where I wanted to go. Only a fool would not want to go to the best program that will help advance their career.

I've been lucky. All three of the colleges that I have attended -- Northeastern, Harvard and Syracuse -- are all in the top 100 -- on the U.S. News and World Report survey, that is.

This year, Harvard and Princeton share the top spot followed by No. 3 Yale and a four way tie for No. 4 between Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania -- all great schools.

U.S. News & World Report bases their rankings on a formula that takes into account factors such as SAT scores, peer reputation, selectivity, and alumni giving.

But I have to wonder if these college rankings haven't degenerated into a sham. The rankings have come under criticism in the past few years and are a hot topic of debate among college educators.

SAT scores, I would agree, are a good indicator of the type of student you're going to find in your student body, same goes for selectivity. The best schools want the best students.

Syracuse earned its No. 1 ranking based partly on what other academics had to say about its program. Syracuse has turned out some of the best broadcast journalists in country, people like Bob Costas, Ted Koppel and Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. That's a pretty impressive roster.

It turns out though that Clemson University's president admitted to manipulating the rankings by ranking his own school higher than any other in the peer review questionnaire. That part of the survey accounts for 25 percent of a school's score. Can't say I blame him. But is it honest? Well, no. Turns out it didn't help Clemson much: They came in at No. 61, same rank they had last year.

Forbes did its own set of rankings and had the U.S. Military Academy or West Point as the No. 1 college in the country followed by Princeton and Cal Tech.

Their methodology though included employability in their rankings.

There is one survey though whose rankings I think everyone should be aware of because I think they are dead on the money accurate, and for good reason.

They are also going to shock you.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report called "What Will They Learn?" that looked at 100 major institutions. They based their rankings on whether those schools required courses in seven key subjects: English composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and science.

On the surface that sounds simple. I mean, those are subject areas I think every one of us would agree are important to getting what we would call a "well rounded" education. Right? Those to me are far more important than peer ranking or alumni giving.

Out of the 100 schools they examined, 25 received F's for their core curricula, 17 got D's and 20 got C's. Only 33 out of the 100 earned B's and only five out of the entire group earned an A.

Only two of the schools required a course on economics: the University of Alaska- Fairbanks and the West Point. A paltry 11 out of the 100 colleges required even a basic survey course in history or U.S. government. Almost half do not require a college level math course.

Here's where it gets funny.

Need to satisfy your literature requirement? How about a course in "Bob Dylan" or "The Graphic Novel" which is basically a course about a comic book. Well, if you're a student at Dartmouth University, you're in luck.

Or this for a science credit: "Why the Sky is Blue." That one can be found at Cornell.

History shmistory! Go to Stanford and you can get credit towards history by taking "Ki ho'alu: The New Renaissance of a Hawaiian Musical Tradition."

Let's not forget science now. How would you feel if your child enrolled in "Chemistry in Popular Novels" or "Search for Extraterrestrial Life." Well, if you go to Yale that counts as a science class. Or my personal favorite, "Physics for Future Presidents" at Wesleyan University.

You laugh, but this wouldn't be so funny if it didn't happen to be true. Nine of the U.S. News schools in the top 20 got F's.

What's funny is that almost every single one of our so-called "Best Colleges" scored an "F" in these basic core offerings, the things we would almost all agree on are subject areas our children need to be well versed in to succeed.

Harvard got a D. The cost to send your child to Harvard? $36, 173. That's a pretty expensive D.

Amherst College, which every year almost always snags the "best" liberal arts college in the country, got an F. The cost? $37,640.

Here's a few others top schools that flunked: Bowdoin College ($38,190), Brown University ($31,190), Cornell ($39,545), Northwestern University ($37, 125), Vanderbilt ($37,005), Yale ($35,300) and Williams College, which battles Amherst year in and year out to be the No. 1 liberal arts school ($37, 640.)

If I'm paying $37,40 to send my kid to Harvard I darn well don't expect them to enroll in underwater basket weaving and have it count toward science class.

On the flip side, guess which schools earned an A? Not ones you would expect. Those are supposed to the Harvards and Yales right?

Those earning A's were: University of Arkansas, University of Texas, Texas A&M, City University of New York-Brooklyn College and West Point.

The average cost for those schools that earned an A? $5,400 compared to $37,700 for those Ivy-League schools.

According to the report, employers list writing, reading comprehension, math, science and foreign language as important and basic skills they want their workers to know. Unfortunately, few of the employers surveyed believe four year college graduates have "excellent" knowledge or skills in any of those areas.

The National Survey of America's College found that 20 percent of graduates couldn't estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the next gas station. That comes as no surprise given that 70 percent of our colleges and universities don't require a math course. More than half of the liberal arts colleges and 40 percent of our national universities surveyed don't require any hard science course. College seniors continue to fail basic history and civics tests.

This should alarm every single parent out there who has a child in college.

We're already to the point where a bachelor's degree doesn't mean anything. If we continue to allow this kind of "anything" goes standards at our colleges and universities pretty soon a college degree won't be worth the paper it is printed on.