THE RANKING VETERINARY COLLEGE FARCE

Veterinary college rankings reflect the rampant corruption in higher education.  I have written about this corruption (Amazon Kindle.com) as being a slow relentless process, which is only detectable by intimate contact within the system such as that made by a professor or even a student. An assessment has to be as personal as education of any kind must be.  Let me explain.

U. S. News and World Report make the only ranking of veterinary colleges. A perusal of their criteria for the ranking is telling. A peer assessment score and an assessment made by residency directors make up 40% of the score. A full 30% of the score relates to research funding. Calculation if research dollars per full time faculty member contributes to a high score. The final 30% relates to quality of students admitted to the college, student acceptance rates, and faculty resources (ratio to students).

Can anyone read this last paragraph believe such evaluations have any merit what so ever?  Residency directors contribute greatly to the assessment. They deal with residency or post graduate clinical training programs; therefore, they interact with graduates from schools other than the one in which they are working.  Secondly, like student peer assessment, what they are really doing is evaluating them selves. This part of the evaluation is 40% of the total.

The next 30% of the rank is based on research funding. Research adds value to lectures but someone working in an isolated laboratory or in an animal holding unit gives no direct benefit to teaching. In fact, it takes time away from teaching. Colleges that hire researcher get researcher, those who hire teacher get teachers. The myth of the great researcher being a great teacher is no more than just that, a myth.

The ones doing the evaluation base the final 30% of the rank on GPA and VAT scores. These are evaluations of the students who enter the program and not the program. These scores have nothing to do with what students learn within the program.  Finally, we get to a sub part of this last 30% that really counts. Student faculty ratio is a measure of the number of students per professor. This is a difficult figure for even a professional educator to evaluate. In teaching surgery and medicine, the ratio is best if it is one on one. In basic science courses, the ration should be 30 or 40 to one; not 100 to one. The modern trend is to hire researchers and call them professors.  These colleges end up with a huge number of professors, which results in a very attractive student teacher ratio but it is a lie—a number of colleges even have more professors than they have students.