Many of the faculty and staff at UW-Platteville are questioning the validity of a national publication that ranked UW-P as noncompetitive.

“I don’t think that a measure of non-competitive versus the levels of competitiveness for enrollment are any kind of measure of the quality of a school,” Joe LeFevre, criminal justice professor said. “Platteville has some top-notch teaching staff, some great facilities and is continually working to improve or innovate so students get a quality education.”

UW-P’s noncompetitive ranking by Barron’s Profile of American Colleges has put the university at the bottom of the list in terms of admissions rankings compared to other four-year Wisconsin schools. Barron’s takes into account many different factors in their rankings and each rank is clearly defined in their publication.

Barron’s defines a school as noncompetitive in their “college admissions selection” portion of the guide if they “generally only require evidence of graduation from an accredited high school (although they may also require completion of a certain number of high school units). Some require that entrance examinations be taken for placement purposes only, or only by graduates of unaccredited high schools or only by out-of-state students. In some cases, insufficient capacity may compel a college in this category to limit the number of students that are accepted; generally, however, if a college accepts 98 percent or more of its applicants, it automatically falls in this category.

Colleges are also rated noncompetitive if they admit all state residents, but have some requirements for nonresidents.

The guidelines for admission to UW-P, according to the UW System’s guide “Find your fit,” produced and distributed every year, states that “new freshmen are likely to be admitted if they rank in the top 50 percent of their class or have a minimum ACT composite score of 22.” Students with a composite ACT of 18 and graduating in the top 65 percent of their class will be considered through a comprehensive review process, according to the admission’s Web site.

According to collegeportrait.org, UW-P admitted 3,047 of the 3,600 new freshmen that applied for the fall of 2008 which is an acceptance rate of 84.6 percent; 1,465 actually enrolled. Of those students, the ACT composite score ranged from 20-25 and 71 percent were in the top 50 percent of their graduating class. College Portrait uses voluntary accountability submissions from the UW System and other schools to determine their statistics.

This standard for admission is comparable to that of UW-Parkside, which requires the same percentile range or a minimum composite score of 20 on the ACT. UW-Stout requires the same percentile range and composite ACT score as UW-P, and UW-Superior requires a 21 on the ACT; Oshkosh’s requirements are comparable to that of Superior. However, schools like UW-La Crosse and UW-Eau Claire require a higher percentile and an ACT composite of 23. Considered to be  UW-P’s counterpart, UW-Whitewater requires students to be in the top 40 percent of their graduating class while ACT results will “impact admission decisions favorably,” according to the “Find Your Fit” publication.

Across the board of UW schools, Platteville’s admissions standards are comparable to that of other four-year institutions in the system, yet Platteville has been ranked behind all of them in the past two Barron’s guides.

Ramifications on the school

Harold Evenson, engineering physics professor, considers Barron’s rankings to be more of a “data-book of university facts.”

“In that sense, ‘competitiveness’ is just another one of their data points, like student to faculty ratio,” Evenson said. “I think of Barron’s as ‘ratings,’ not ‘rankings,’ and our competitiveness rating is rock bottom. This rating of ‘noncompetitive’ certainly has bad connotations.”

Discussion has been sparked in the College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Science after it was brought to their attention by a UW-P alumni that a large insurance company would no longer be able to recruit at Platteville because of the low ranking.

“These rankings are important because some companies will not come to career fairs, hold on-campus interviews or recruit students from universities below a certain ranking,” said Mike Rowe, software engineering and computer science professor. “It can also hurt the initial starting salary of students at some companies, as they factor school ranking and GPA into initial salary offers.”

Rankings of colleges can also be important when it comes to attracting new freshmen.

“If you’re a top-tier student and come across this rating, would you, or your parents, decide that another university might be better for you?” Evenson said. “We can still attract these students, I believe, based on the strength of our engineering and nano programs and the great faculty-student interaction, but are we now less able to get these prospective students to campus to learn these things? My concern, though, is that we have to work harder to recruit competitive students and faculty to come here.”

Effects of remedial programs

Admissions standards are meant to determine a student’s preparedness for higher education but they seem to be in flux when it comes to students entering their first year of college. Many students are required to take remedial math and English programs before being allowed to enter into standard 1000 level courses. Remedial courses are often used as means to supplement a required knowledge that a student did not exhibit on the entrance exams and could lead to the misconception that anyone can get into UW-P.

“If a student is taking remedial math and remedial English, what other courses are they qualified to take?” Evenson said. “How can they get a load of college courses if they’re taking what are essentially high school courses?”

UW System professors at four year institutions are not allowed to teach remedial courses so they have to be contracted out to schools like Southwest Wisconsin Technical College or two year system schools like UW-Richland.

Despite the Barron’s rankings, staff at UW-P is confident in its programs and the quality of students that graduate from them.

What do the rankings really mean?

“If you look at our graduates and the students that come out of our university, at least the engineering programs, which I’m familiar with, their FE exam scores are always at or above the state and national averages and placement rates seem to be holding steady,” Evenson said.

US News & World Report also publishes a guide on college rankings and has ranked UW-P in its third tier of master’s education.

“The Universities-Master’s categories are of the entire school focusing on each school’s undergraduate program,” according to usnews.com. Also in the third tier are UW-Oshkosh, UW-River Falls and UW- Stout. There is no tier two in the US News rankings and schools like UW-La Crosse, UW-Eau Claire, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Whitewater are ranked in tier one with no UW schools in tier four.

US News breaks colleges into categories based on mission, like research or liberal arts, then further defines them based on 15 criteria for academic excellence.

High school students and counselors looking for an institution for higher education use services like Barron’s and the US News rankings to choose an institute for higher education. Companies looking to hire qualified graduates from a large pool of applicants from different colleges with different experiences also take into account the ranking of the school.

“As I look at the [Barron’s] rankings I see that UW-Milwaukee, a research school, is ranked as ‘less competitive.’ UW-Parkside also has the ‘less competitive’ ranking,” LeFevre said. “So I would think that these rankings only come from enrollment statistics. Statistics can be taken out of context and can have many variables that may or may not also be taken into account.”