CULTURE: Exploring the Belly of the Beast (Rollins Best Party School)

By swizzmin on 10 Oct

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What does it mean to be a party school? Better yet, how can something as subjective as “happiness” be quantified and studied? And, in all honesty, what does it mean to be No. 1? Magazines and other media publications try to answer these questions whenever they introduce a new set of ratings, rankings or lists. Recently, Newsweek and The Daily Beast (who merged last year), as well as U.S. News &World Report, complied their own rankings of schools across the nation, with Rollins faring quite well against the competition. Interestingly, these lists suggest an odd identity crisis, a difference of perception, if you will — a tale of two schools.

Newsweek wrote an article entitled “The Best Colleges for You.” The article’s goal was to try and help students choose the colleges most appropriate for their needs by compiling 25 different national lists, each based on individual qualities that students find most appealing when looking for a school. These topics included Athletic, Most Service-Oriented, Activists, Best Food, Future CEOs, Accessible Professors and several others. Rollins College ranked No. 12 in “Happiest” and No. 10 in “Party School.” As with any ranking, though, it is always the methodology that needs to be taken into account. “Happiest,” an intrinsically subjective rating, was devised by comparing six categories, like dining, nightlife and student-teacher ratio, taken from sources such as College Prowler and College Board, and weighted equally using z-scores (a measure of how close each school is to average.) Our “Party School” ranking was devised in much a similar manner, using more objective measures such as Drug and Liquor law violations and a percentage of institution size, with information taken from the United States Department of Education as well as College Prowler.

When confronted with these statistics, President Lewis Duncan felt that, while there is no problem in being ranked “Happiest” (even joking, “You wouldn’t want to be the unhappiest campus in the country”), he believes that a rating like “Party School” as an “overall perception of what that means is a significant misrepresentation of what life on campus is like.” He compared Rollins to other schools, saying, “Thursday night is a party night on most football campuses, and yet here we have the Global Peace Film Festival underway, there is a talk ... on the US/Iranian nuclear weapons program ... and also a steady diet of athletic events on campus other than football. So I don’t think that, by objective criteria, Rollins looks much like a party school at all. In fact I would doubt that many of our students, if they had comparisons to almost any other school, would think that this was what that name implies.” He went on to state later in the interview that the administration has worked hard with students to provide alternative programing (such as Rollins After Dark) to give students “alcohol free, safe alternatives instead of having to leave campus and get into environments with more temptations and less oversight.” On the subject of opportunity, he said that “many large public schools are surrounded by bars, which is not the case here. That may or may not be a good thing. Personally, I think it is a good thing we are not surrounded by bars, but for students who want to go to bars, they go downtown, which is a less safe environment.” When I brought up the point that we are the closest college to downtown Orlando, where there is a huge club scene, President Duncan responded by saying, “You can’t easily walk to a lot of bars, butthey are only 15 minutes away. And that isn’t gonna change.”

On the other side of the coin, U.S. News &World Report just released its well-known “Best Colleges” rankings for 2012, with Rollins College receiving the No. 1 spot for Regional Universities in the South for the seventh consecutive year. That being said, many students do not know the true meaning behind said statistic, or even the metrics behind the ranking. U.S. News &World Report’s methodology is much more detailed and complicated than that used by Newsweek, but as the magazine stated on its website, the crux of the statistic is based on the “Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education 2010 revisions to its highly respected Basic Classification. The Basic Classification is the traditional framework that Carnegie has used to classify colleges.” This framework was chosen as “it is used extensively as the basis for classifying schools by higher education researchers. For example, the U.S. Department of Education and many higher education associations use the system to organize their data and [is] the basis for research studies. In addition, in some cases, Carnegie Categories are used to determine colleges' eligibility for grant money.” So, what this all means is that U.S. World & News categorizes and separates all universities and colleges in the nation into four separate categories: National Colleges, National Universities, Regional Colleges and Regional Universities. Rollins’ category, Regional Universities, is described as schools who “offer a full range of undergrad programs and some master's programs but few doctoral programs.” From there, Rollins is separated into one of four subregions: North, South, Mid-West and West. Florida is one of only 12 states designated for the South, and in the end, Rollins only competes with 127 other schools designated within the category of “Regional Universities.” In other words, we are not compared to UCF, UF or FSU. We are not compared to Harvard, Yale or Stanford. And we are not even compared to Williams and Lee or Amherst. To put it in layman’s terms, it is like being told that one can become king of the gym, yet all one had to do was take over the men’s bathroom.

When asked specifically about the significance of the U.S. News and World Report ranking, Dean Laurie Joyner said that, although she believes the ranking does matter, it is “one piece of information within [an] entire constellation of variables,” such as retention rate, academic reputation and the number of alumni that give back to the school. President Duncan, Dean Joyner and Executive Director of Student Success Meghan Harte all noted that it was important to look at how these ratings were taken and the differences between subjectivity and objectivity. In the end, ratings are only a small piece of the puzzle. Magazines are also a business, and they choose their ranking criteria and categories as much to get people interested in reading their articles as they do to give solid information to their readers.

I do not hold much stock in ratings, not just because of what they say about Rollins, but because of what they do not say as well. Rollins has much to offer, from an impeccable education and great resources for its students to amazing scenery and a growing sense of community. Yet we cannot deny the intrinsic flaws that are still present at this school. And many questions arise from the supposed “answers” that these magazines try to give: If both ratings have flawed methodologies, then how does Rollins rank up to itself? What metrics are in place for us to know if we are fulfilling our mission statement of “global citizenship and responsible leadership?” Are we a party school, and is that an intrinsically negative thing, or does it allow others to view Rollins as an institute that does not take itself too seriously? Finally, how much is perception, how much is reality, and is the perceived reality just as harmful, if not more so, than what is truly in front of us?

Over the next few issues, I will delve into these topics, using interviews conducted with many leaders on our own campus, including Joyner, Duncan, Harte and Director of Multicultural Affairs Mahjabeen Rafiuddin. Personally, I say to hell with these ratings. They are fun to brag about but should only be given so much weight or meaning. I want to know what is really going on at this school … and I hope you will come along with me for the ride.