Higher education is awash with rankings, proclaiming the best universities, college dorms and even campus food. Now a new ranking aims to measure the effectiveness of college presidents.
Launched by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, the rankings score presidents based on how much they supported student success, increased access and improved affordability. The study, which used federal data to measure graduation rates, socioeconomic diversity of the student body and tuition costs, ranked 446 college presidents who served at about 200 U.S. institutions between 2000 and 2023.
The ranked leaders don’t have to be current presidents or even still alive; at the top of the list sits the late Gary Thomas, who served as president of the University of Missouri at Rolla from 2001 to 2005. (The Rolla campus is now the Missouri University of Science and Technology.) At the bottom, in spot 446, is Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel during the Clinton administration who went on to lead Baylor University from 2011 to 2016; he died in 2022. And while most colleges haven’t touted the presidential study results like they sometimes do their institutional rankings, some—such as the University of San Diego, where James T. Harris III was declared the top sitting president—sent out press releases celebrating their leader’s performance.
Like all rankings in the education sphere, these have generated widespread skepticism, not only about the study’s methodology but also about whether college presidents can actually be ranked on a narrow set of metrics.
Ranking Presidents
Cody Christensen, the researcher behind the rankings, said he got the idea in the aftermath of last December’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, in which the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology waffled on a question about hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jewish students.
Blowback was fierce; the presidents of Penn and Harvard stepped down shortly thereafter.
Christensen, a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University studying higher education policy, said that amid the tumult, “for the first time, it seemed like the public and Congress were interested in the leadership and performance of what college presidents were actually doing.”
The spotlight presented a “natural jumping-off point” for research on what makes an effective college president, he said—a position he thought was sorely underexamined compared to other leadership roles, such as CEOs.
Christensen, who worked for AEI as a research assistant before enrolling in graduate school, reached out to the organization to contract a one-off study assessing what he sees as one of the world’s hardest jobs.
“You’re running an organization that’s massive, that’s so disconnected, it has so many different competing interests, and the president of a university arguably has less control over the direction of their institution than any other chief executive of an organization,” Christensen said. “You have different deans and different provosts. You’ve got entirely siloed offices for financial aid and admissions. You have faculty that almost exclusively do research, and you’re competing for national grants, and then trying to fundraise for your endowment on top of all of that, while also being the figurehead, presumably helping the institution stay on course.”
With that in mind, Christensen set out to rank presidents based on “what the institution itself said mattered,” as well as “factors that mattered to students, families, taxpayers and policymakers.” That led him to focus on student success, access and affordability.
But Christensen acknowledged that the rankings don’t fully capture everything that institutions value; he noted that many universities emphasize research output, for instance, which is not part of the study. Such data is challenging to obtain and holds less weight for students and families, he said.
Christensen hopes the rankings provide a metric for boards and policymakers to assess presidents. Too often, he said, their focus is on whether an institution climbed or dropped in the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, rather than on more illuminating metrics such as retention and graduation rates, the diversity of the student body, and tuition prices.
“I understand that not all or every change is because of the college president’s leadership, but if you’re slipping on all fronts, I think it’s worth the conversation to hear what the president has to say about it, and if they can explain it or not. I think that’s valuable,” Christensen said.
Can Presidents Be Ranked?
The college presidency has long been a tough job, but the last few years have brought unique challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the looming demographic cliff, widespread campus protests, plummeting distrust in higher education and increasing scrutiny from conservative lawmakers.
The tenure of presidents has also declined in recent years, down to 5.9 years in the latest American Council on Education survey.
Given the ever-evolving slate of challenges presidents face, some experts believe they shouldn’t be ranked solely on student success, access and affordability.
Michael Harris, a professor of higher education and chair of the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at Southern Methodist University, called the rankings “a gross oversimplification,” arguing that the study doesn’t factor in the many things that are outside of a president’s control and that the criteria are too broad given the specific, individual challenges each campus faces.
“I think it’s so contextual. You need to know the particular aspects of that institution, but also what that institution needs at that time,” he said. “At some stages of their development, institutions may need more capital projects and capital campaigns and fundraising. At other times—think about the current [political] climate—can they effectively work with the governor and the Legislature?”
Harris also argued the nature of the presidency is increasingly outward-looking, making it difficult to rank the job based on internal numbers alone.
“A lot of the focus of the president is externally focused. It’s government relations, fundraising, development, making friends—broadly defined. It’s driven by what’s happening outside of the institution. A lot of what the president is doing is broad strategic direction,” he said.
Kevin McClure, a professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said that boards typically evaluate presidents according to specific measures built into strategic plans. Finances, enrollment and national rankings performance are often important factors, but the metrics may vary a great deal depending on the circumstances.
“There may also be specific things a president was hired to do, and those could similarly be part of that evaluation. That could include things like, ‘We have hired someone who is a really good fundraiser, and one of the primary things that we’re looking for is someone who is going to lead us in this next fundraising campaign,’” McClure said. “They could have been brought in as a stabilizer, someone who came in after a period of crisis, or after a no-confidence vote in their predecessor and tried to restore confidence and trust from faculty or others.”
Limitations of Rankings
Sometimes faculty views are included in presidential evaluations. And professors often have different priorities than governing boards, such as transparency, shared governance, manageable workloads and academic freedom.
McClure believes it can be difficult to craft an external evaluation for presidents, given the limitations on available data and its tenuous connection to leadership and performance. He noted that presidents rely on numerous subordinates to help carry out their job, and that the work of the university is driven largely by faculty and staff who work directly with students.
“To what extent do we attribute institutional performance to one individual?” McClure said.
Christensen agreed that the rankings are limited in scope, noting in the study that “measures used to judge performance reflect only part of the roles and responsibilities” of a university leader, and that “some circumstances are outside the control of college presidents.” He also pointed out that public university presidents may have less control over certain measures than the leaders of private institutions. Ultimately, he advised against putting too much faith in any one ranking.
“I often am a rankings skeptic. I think a lot of weight gets put on rankings,” Christensen said. “I now find myself putting out a ranking, and I continue to share a lot of those cautions.”
But he suggested the findings of his study can help ascertain how presidents have moved the needle at their respective institutions—particularly on student success, access and affordability.
“I don’t imagine that my college president rankings are going to have that much impact or gravity to change institutional behaviors and habits. But I think it could be a healthy starting place,” Christensen said.
(This story has been updated to include the correct name of the University of San Diego president.)