The 10th and final edition of The Gourman Report, published in 1997 by Princeton Review.
For a number of personal and professional reasons, Michael O’Brien’s 1998 biography of former Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh has occupied a significant portion of my side reading time. While wrapping up the chapter covering his final years as president (in office from 1952 to 1987), I noticed that O’Brien utilized the Gourman Report as a reference for assessing the university’s progress under Hesburgh. The Report ranked Notre Dame’s law school as #36 in the country and its undergraduate business program as #39.[1] I questioned why O’Brien selected law and undergraduate business as his marker points, and that led me back to Gourman Report itself–and the issue of college rankings.
The Gourman Report served as an industry standard in the time of O’Brien’s research. Jack Gourman began his Report, a guidebook on disciplines and institutions, in 1967. Apparently his interest in assessing higher education dated to the mid-1950s, but took his time putting that work on record. The assessment’s proper title, as of 1987, was Gourman Report: A Rating of Undergraduate Programs in American and International Colleges and Universities. By 1984, David Webster (a professor of higher education at Penn and then at Oklahoma State), relayed that it was being cited by numerous experts in academic journals. Citations to it appeared in the Journal of Higher Education, Sociology of Education, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Human Resources, and others. From 1972 to 1983, the Social Sciences Citation Index reports it had received 40 known citations.[2]
The Gourman Report scored programs on a scale ranging from 2.01 to 4.99. After appearing in several iterations during the 1970s and 1980s, by 1997 it had become a 394-page volume that ranked not only 140 disciplines and 1243 institutions, but also administrative areas including libraries, alumni associations, and boards of trustees. The year 1997 is important because the Gourman Report was also picked up by Princeton Review and distributed by Random House.[3] The 1997 edition–the 10th–was the last.
Gourman guarded his methodology closely. The 1967 guide, for example, provided a “report card” for each institution. As noted above, that card assessed the health, via a numerical rating, of academic departments and the other non-departmental units (administration, student services, faculty, libraries, plant efficiency, etc.). Each of these non-departmental areas had sub-factors. The faculty rating, for instance, assessed areas such as morale, effectiveness, instructional methods. But the 1967 was unique that it combined all of these assessments into an “overall institutional score.” That score, for that iteration of his report, graded on a 200-800 scale (mimicking the SAT) in each category (800 as “A,” 200 as “D”). Then the scores were averaged for the overall report. In 1967, Princeton was the top school with a 772 score, with Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and Columbia rounding out the top 5. Of the 1,100 assessed that year, the bottom-scoring school was Michigan Lutheran College at 226. These scores were presented, in the Report, in a card format that also listed the grade for every area, tuition and fees, and total enrollment.[4]
As time progressed, and as Gourman produced new editions in 1977, 1980 (2), 1982 (2), 1983 (2), and others up to the last produced in 1997. His included more analytical factors, and his methodology became increasingly complex. By 1977 he included alumni associations, student competitiveness for scholarships and fellowships, and other factors. He also began to cover foreign institutions. Each subsequent edition included more and more numerical factors. In 1980, Gourman relays that he requested of his publisher the inclusion of a 55-page description of his methodology. But that was refused. The refusal continued in 1983, when Gourman reported that his methodological appendix had grown to “hundreds of pages.” The basis of exclusion, Gourman said, was publication costs—that adding the methodology would have priced his Report “out of the market.” [5]
But all of Gourman’s rankings were, in essence, a fraud.
David Webster never uses that term, but his 1984 analysis, recapped in a 1997 interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, points in that direction. “The rankings are wretched,” he reported to the Chronicle‘s Jeffrey Selingo. “Gourman tried his best,” reflected Webster, “to do a good rankings book the first time around, and after he was seriously criticized for it, he figured it wasn’t worth the expense or effort to put much work into it in the future.” He criticized Gourman for concealing his methodology and not separating large and small colleges. That methodology seems, at base to Webster, to have consisted of a lot of research in college and university catalogues. Some institutional officials, worried about Gourman’s potential impact, sent information or wrote him letters about his work. A Princeton administrator, whose institution benefited from The Gourman Report, said he couldn’t recall phone call or survey sent by Gourman. Webster concluded: Gourman “has done nothing to deserve his work being published by the Princeton Review.” [6]
Indeed, in his 1984 study of the Gourman Report’s various iterations, Webster exhibited serious suspicion of Gourman’s work. Webster noted that one of “the mysterious features” of the report is its publication history. The 1967 edition was published by the “Continuing Education Institute, Inc.,” with offices purportedly in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. The second edition, available in 1977, was published by “National Education Standards” (NES) in Los Angeles. The NES office moved from West Seventh Street to 650 Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, but otherwise NES published all but the first of the Gourman Report. But here’s the thing: About a week after his December 11, 1980 interview with Gourman, Webster personally investigated the NES locations in Los Angeles. He never located a physical sign of the publisher’s existence. And that came after Webster discovering that another Chronicle reporter, working on a 1978 article, was unable to find an official listing for “Continuing Education Institute, Inc.” in the 1966-1968 editions of the Publishers Trade List Annual, Books in Print, or Literary Market Place. [7] All of Gourman’s Reports were self-published but under the ruse of official-sounding entities. And this ruse matters in relation to Gourman’s claims regarding publisher refusal to print his methodology.
As for the creator, Gourman, he is apparently still living but exceedingly difficult to research.[8] In a 1984 article for Change magazine, Webster–who had sat with Gourman for a three-hour, in-person interview in 1980–discovered that Gourman was a Notre Dame double graduate (BA in 1949, MA in 1952) who also held two Master’s degrees from UCLA. Gourman’s PhD, technically a Doctorat d’Universitie from the Sorbonne, was of a type that did not qualify graduates for French teaching posts. At the time of publication for his first Report, Gourman served as an associate professor of political science at California State University – Northridge. [9]
In light of Webster’s devastating analysis Gourman’s Report, it is curious that he took the personal background information provided by Gourman at face value. Webster does not report checking with each institution about Gorman’s credentials. For my part, I wonder if they are legitimate, and even if “Jack Gourman” is his legal name. Gourman seems a kind of classic American huckster that could’ve been covered in Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland.
Given the 1998 publication of O’Brien’s work on Hesburgh, I don’t necessarily fault him for resorting to Gourman’s rankings. Webster’s first analysis was published in a somewhat obscure magazine (Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning) focused on higher ed management issues. Although that article was 14 years old at the time O’Brien’s book appeared, the critical analysis of college rankings is an obscure subject and it was a side point to O’Brien’s overall goal–a biography of Hesburgh. Even Selingo’s report appeared in the Chronicle in the late stages of O’Brien’s research (his book was probably already in page-proof stage). At that point Webster did not use the provocative term “fraud.” And even in 1984 he only said of Gourman that he was “not a responsible arbiter of educational quality.” [10]
At the end of his 1984 Change article, Webster raised important questions about rankings that remain unanswered. To wit, why does the American public insist that “quality can be transferred into a ‘Top Ten” chart”? How are rankings constructed? What are the “difficulties involved”? How can the profession adequately meet, “with integrity,” the public’s desire for rankings?
Webster’s questions underscore the twentieth-century trend, heightened in the post-World War II period, to view higher education as a consumption item. As higher education became more of a business—a trend recognized in the Port Huron Statement signatories (see section two of this post)—many parents and students saw that education as an investment. The shopped the market for a commodity, and all parties expected a return on that investment. This reified the existing ideology of administrators in a revenue-rich era (economics may not have determined their ideology, but it was their ultimate “determining element” and mediating factor, to use the words of Friedrich Engels).[11] That revenue came from research investments made by the federal government, given after universities had proven their value to the military-industrial complex. With consumers shopping a market of at least 1,100 institutions across 50 states, it makes sense that a general desire for guidance arose. What institution could sell the most degree options that guaranteed purchasers at least a middle-class lifestyle?
Enter the fraudulent guide of “Jack Gourman.” If he hadn’t filled the void, another would have. Someone had to help sell the fantasy. – TL
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Notes
[1] Michael O’Brien, Hesburgh: A Biography (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 178-179.
[2] Jeffrey Selingo, “A Self-Published College Guide Goes Big-Time, and Educators Cry Foul,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 7, 1997; David Webster, “Who is Jack Gourman and why is he saying those things about my college?,” Change 16, no. 8 (Nov-Dec. 1984): 14–19, 45-56. David Webster’s doctoral dissertation explored educational rankings and their methods. In addition to this 1984 article in Change, another was published in 1983 in the same venue on the graduate school rankings.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Webster, 19, 45-46, 48.
[5] Ibid., 49, 55, 56.
[6] Selingo.
[7] Webster, 19, 47-48, 55
[8] No obituary seems to be available. Using Lexis-Nexis Uni, the latest article I found mentioning Gourman dates from 2002. Help from an enterprising reader would be welcome!
[9] Webster, 17.
[10] Ibid., 55.
[11] Friedrich Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism” (To Joseph Bloch and Franz Mehring), The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 760, 766.
12 Thoughts on this Post
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Tim, thanks for this provocative post. I suppose U.S. News is the ranking that carries the most weight now.
It might be interesting to consider this kind of ranking “system” — or lack thereof — alongside Sarah Igo’s work in The Averaged American. Whoever “consumed” this report — my guess would be high school career/college guidance counselors, parents, prospective students, etc. — may not have cared so much about the methodology as they cared about the (purported) quantifiability and numeric norming suggested by Gourman.
I also find it interesting that this report emerges in the wake of the Free Speech Movement. What publicly-aimed college ranking guides existed before the FSM, other than a Carnegie rating? It may not surprise you to know that after the canon wars of the 1980s, there was a cottage industry of “conservative” college ranking guides that came out, ranking colleges on how much political correctness supposedly plagued their campuses. Of course Stanford ranked very low in some of these, which I find absolutely laughable and infuriating at the same time — as if the Olin-funded and Koch-funded shills who wrote these kinds of screeds wouldn’t have slobbered all over themselves to get their kids into Stanford. When somebody makes a pronouncement about how the university is garbage, or higher ed is doomed, or political correctness has taken over academe, I always want to know where they went to college, and where they’re sending their kids.
In any case, the possible anti-political origins of the report (speculating here on a connection to the FSM and student protests / student activism) may speak to O’Brien’s selection of law and undergraduate business — a professional school and a (purportedly) apolitical vocational discipline. Of course there’s nothing apolitical about business as a discipline or as a vocation. But perhaps looking at progress in the humanities or qualitative social sciences would have seemed too politically fraught?
In the post’s words, “the twentieth-century trend, heightened in the post-World War II period, to view higher education as a consumption item” meant that rankings projects almost certainly were going to appear. The proliferation of institutions of higher ed, plus the view of it as a consumption item (i.e., its commodification), created a demand for rankings, a market for them, and that demand was going to be met. Given that, it’s probably better to have rankings projects that are at least somewhat transparent about their methodology and criteria than those, like the Gourman Report after its first edition, that are not.
That’s not to say that the attention given to the U.S. News rankings, and the desperate or intense pursuit of higher rankings by univ. administrators, is a positive thing. Just to say that it seems rankings are here to stay in one form or another, and better to have them in as close to a non-fraudulent, transparent form as possible, where at least they can be argued over and challenged because their criteria and methods have been spelled out publicly.
There now exist alternative rankings projects to U.S. News — I believe The Washington Monthly has such a project (published in book form, presumably annually) — that use different criteria and come up with different results. That’s healthier than a situation in which one rankings project is the only game in town.
The structure and character of the higher ed industry — I use that word intentionally — in the U.S. mean that (perceived) hierarchies and rankings, both ‘globally’ and in more specific terms of particular programs and departments, are inevitable. Also inevitable (or at least unsurprising) are books touting often overlooked or little-noticed colleges, for ex., that it’s argued provide very good educations at comparatively reasonable cost. The existence of hierarchies and rankings will generate efforts to push back (as they should) and to inform students and parents, the consumers in this marketplace, of the full range of their choices.
Louis, I’m not so sure about your assertion that “the proliferation of institutions of higher education…created a demand for rankings of them.” That’s taking the logic of the market as an immutable law.
It’s worthwhile to consider who uses rankings, and who does not. No legacy family at Harvard gives a damn about rankings. No fourth or fifth-generation Yale alum is going to make a college decision based on rankings.
College rankings schemes are aimed at people who are brand new to higher education — which is why, I expect, they emerge after World War II, when the GI Bill vastly expands access to higher education to the sons and daughters of the working class. They are aimed at people who are unaware of how the prestige economy of higher education works, and they actually serve to mask that prestige economy and allow for the illusion of a meritocratic hierarchy.
L.D.,
I agree up to a point. I’d suggest among other things, however, that the workings of the prestige economy of higher education in the U.S. may have become more complicated as more institutions have moved closer to the center of that economy. Take, just as one example that can stand in for some others, the Univ. of Maryland. Forty years ago, basically any high-school graduate in Md. with an average record could get into U Md. That’s certainly not the case today, and as its selectivity has increased its place in the prestige economy has changed correspondingly. As for the illusion of a meritocratic hierarchy, it’s probably not a complete or total illusion (though it would be hard to say exactly how much of it in percentage terms is pure illusion) and it’s connected, sometimes doubtless in complex ways, to the prestige economy (e.g., the most prestigious schools can often, not always, attract the most accomplished researchers/scholars, which in turn reinforces their prestige, etc.). I’ll concede that these statements are somewhat vague.
Also, I didn’t mean to take the logic of the market as an immutable law. It was not the proliferation of institutions alone that created a market for rankings, istm, but proliferation plus ‘commodification’, and both resulted from a particular set of economic and social developments/conditions.
Thanks to Lora and Louis for these comments. A few thoughts:
1. I think you’re correct, Lora, that the U.S. New and World Report rankings are the best known and publicized. But there is also the Times Higher Education world rankings. And I believe the Chronicle ranks American higher ed grad programs as well. The “rankings industry” is diverse—you have best Christian colleges, best liberal arts colleges, best in each state, best research universities, etc. We now have rankings for every consumable in higher ed. And I think Gourman started that trend.
2. Your citation, Lora, of Sarah Igo’s work is spot on. I love her book. I didn’t think of it immediately during my deep dive into Gourman’s “work.” But he certainly played to the tendencies on display in Igo’s book.
3. I’d love to know more about Gourman’s politics. That’s why I looked hard for his bio or an obit. As a purported poli sci guy working in California, he most certainly must’ve had positions about FSM, Reagan, etc. One of the most enthusiastic reviews of Gourman’s first edition came from Russell Kirk and appeared in the The National Review. Webster notes the review in his 1984 paper (p. 18), but doesn’t cite conservative ideology as playing a part in Kirk’s enthusiasm. Rather, Kirk was focused on “excellence.” What amazed me about Kirk’s review, as relayed by Webster, was how easily Kirk believed, or bought into, the numbers. Kirk called them “amazingly accurate.” That gullibility ran counter to my impressions of Kirk as a humanist.
4. Louis: I’m with Lora on there being at least two prominent currents to higher ed consumption: one views and consumes higher education with merit and aspiration in mind, and the other sees cultural capital and maintenance of class. For the latter college/university is just a rite of passage, but for the former it’s a way to break out of cycles of oppression. The third current, less prominent one, is to enter into the life of the mind–to be a part of academia. Rankings matter to the class climbers/security seekers and those who want to be educators.
5. On whether rankings are a permanent part of our social and educational landscape, well, so long as we live in a neoliberal moment and capitalist society, I do believe rankings are structured into the game. If we were to achieve a more socialist/leveled society, I think that the value would be on place and, I hope, the life of the mind.
That’s it for now. Thanks so much to you both for engaging my post. – TL
Tim, thanks for this further illumination. If Russell Kirk touted that rankings book early in the National Review, I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that Gourman’s ratings skew to conservative politics, and I’d even go so far as to suggest he had some conservative money bankrolling his project. That’s how this stuff worked. How did he rate UC Berkeley, and what state flagship universities did he rank above it? That would be interesting to know.
Okay…
As luck would have it, what looks like Jack Gourman’s thesis PhD dissertation — or, a Jack Gourman’s thesis — is currently available for sale on eBay. The degree-granting institution was Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood, CA — a school whose noteworthy alumni include Angie Dickinson, Pat Caroll, and Cherie Moraga.
Also, in March 1958, the American Political Science Review noted in its “Appointment and Staff Changes” section the following information: “Jack Gourman has received appointment as a permanent instructor of political science at Immaculate Heart College.”
How many “Jack Gourman”s who were political scientists whose college ranking book would garner the enthusiastic endorsement of Catholic convert Russell Kirk were there in 1967? My guess is just this one.
Note that in the late 1960s, a crisis of leadership occurred at Immaculate Heart because the sisters running the school wanted to liberalize in the spirit of Vatican II and trustees of the college resisted.
What are the odds, you think, that Gourman saw that as an opportune time to jump ship, land at nearby Northridge, and rebrand himself not as the undistinguished alumnus of an undistinguished tiny Catholic college, but as the arbiter of value for colleges more generally?
Now, maybe this book for sale on eBay is not in fact a dissertation granted by “Immaculate Heart College,” but that school’s publication of Gourman’s manuscript? Maybe they published faculty works themselves rather than have faculty submit them to university presses? I don’t know. It looks for all the world like a bound dissertation to me. And if it is a bound dissertation, I bet this is why refers to his (honorary?) (later?) PhD from the Sorbonne as his credential — prestige, prestige, prestige.
Now, maybe I’m slandering some poor hapless PoliSci prof who just happened to share the name of Jack Gourman and might be around the same age — PhD in 1957 or 1958 would make him, what, born in 1933 or so? — and who happened to teach at a Catholic college in Hollywood that happened to try to cling to traditionalism when the nuns wanted to liberalize. I don’t know.
But there’s no way Russell Kirk gave that endorsement / positive review out of the blue. Dollars to doughnuts.
Well, this story is getting weird. What right would a small Catholic college have to offer a PhD? I’m going to have to ponder this some more.
Well, it could be an M.A. thesis, which might be why it’s not listed in Dissertations & Abstracts (I checked).
Aspects of the above exchange suggest to me that I might need to clarify my views on something: when I said commodification led to a demand for rankings, all I meant was that publishers, like U.S. News, now saw them as something they could sell and presumably make money on. I did not say, nor did I even imply, that most applicants care about them, use them, make them a basis for decision-making etc. Clearly, families whose ties to a particular university go back generations are not going to care at all about rankings, and those who already know a lot about the higher ed sector or who have the informal knowledge that most upper-middle-class kids and their families probably do, won’t pay much attention to rankings either (though fads about which colleges are in fashion or desirable may influence where students apply). Exactly who cares about rankings, and exactly how they are used and by whom, I’m not sure, though no doubt there are sociology PhD dissertations on the subject.
Incidentally, whether The Washington Monthly makes money on its annual college rankings, which it has released since 2005 and which I mentioned upthread, I don’t know. Its 2017 ranking of liberal arts colleges (see link below) has Berea College in Kentucky at #1, which may be some indication of how it differs from the US News list (I’m pretty sure Berea College was not #1 in the US News rankings of liberal arts colleges, though it may have placed high — not bothering to check).
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017college-guide
p.s. I see that Wash. Monthly purports to rate schools based on “what they are doing for the country,” which frankly is just puffing apart from Wash Monthly’s specific criteria, which are what matters here and which are presumably laid out somewhere on the site. (And yes, I do know Wash Monthly had, and presumably still has, a particular political perspective.)
Fun facts about the mysterious Jack Gourman, from archival traces…
He was interviewed by the LA Times about college reputations/rankings in 1962, and was then a “Professor of History” at Immaculate, per the LA Times.
In 1964, he was 35 years old, per a Pasadena newspaper, meaning he was born in 1929-ish. The newspaper ran an article about his “scientific” rating system for colleges, and said he had “recently released his list” of rated schools. Per the article, Gourman was a former professor at Immaculate, a current professor at Loyola Marymount, and an alumnus of UCLA. (Any reader who is an alumnus of UCLA and a member of the alumni association should be able to look him up and see what year he graduated and with what degree.)
Here’s what the 1964 article (actually a UPI wire service article, so it ran in many papers) says about Gourman’s views: “Gourman is outspoken in criticism of the much lauded California Master Plan that sets up a state college system which he feels deprives the single institution of individualistic identity. ‘A great waste in higher education comes from the unnecessary duplication of programs,’ said Gourman, ‘both among and within institutions.'”
A brief note in a 1967 number of the Notre Dame alumni magazine mentions the publication of Gourman’s 1967 ratings book and confirms that he was an alumnus — class of ’49 and class of ’52. AND it reminds readers of his two-sport athletic career (track and baseball) and the fact that after graduating from Notre Dame he had signed a minor-league contract with the Boston Braves (!). However, the only “Jack Gourman” I can find mentioned as a minor-league ball player in newspapers is a 17-year-old kid from Seattle, Washington who was signed by the Philadelphia A’s in 1945. It seems to be the same Jack Gourman who graduated from Notre Dame in 1949 and was a varsity track athlete. (This per Notre Dame’s 1949 yearbook, which lists Gourman’s home town as Seattle, Washington).
Gourman was hired by San Fernando Valley State College (the institution’s name before it became Cal State Northridge) in the fall of 1965. This per the student newspaper — he’s listed as one of 125 new faculty members (!!!!!!!!!!!) hired for that fall. For someone who didn’t think much of the Master Plan, he certainly didn’t have any problems taking a tenure track job. Can you imagine what it must be like to be at an institution that hires 125 new people to start the school year — and then just imagine that happening all up and down the state of California. In fact, the newspaper said that 25-30 faculty positions remained unfilled at the start of the school year. Holy moly.
Anyway, by 1965 Gourman was in the position that, I presume, he held until his academic retirement.
I would really like to hear confirmation from a UCLA alumnus that Gourman is, in fact, an alumnus of UCLA — a degreed alumnus, I mean. Because that thesis/dissertation published at/by Immaculate just doesn’t make sense.