Kansas University Provost Richard Lariviere admits that it’s interesting and sometimes fascinating to look at rankings on anything.

But beware, he says, particularly regarding major universities, for sometimes the rankings can reflect more about who creates them than how schools end up in them.

He spoke about the most popular university ranking system in U.S. News & World Report, which in 2007 listed KU as the 39th best public university and 88th best among public and private universities. Both were improvements from 2006, but KU has hovered in that range the decade after sitting at 30th among public schools in 1998.

Lariviere said he hadn’t even looked at the U.S. News rankings, but that it is a challenge because many potential students, parents and alumni tend to.

“If you manage a university to try to enhance rankings, then all you are doing is buying into this misrepresentation of what it is that we’re really about here,” Lariviere said.

Public universities tend to suffer in the rankings compared with private universities based on certain criteria, such as selective admissions, he said.

KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway has said the rankings are a proxy for quality that the public seeks out.

Measuring the health of a university is more about having programs that are considered among the best in the field by peers, Lariviere said.

According to the U.S. News Rankings on best graduate schools released in the spring, KU has 12 programs ranked in the top 10 among public universities, including the top-ranked city management and urban policy master’s degree program and the special education master’s and doctorate programs.

Lariviere also considers a major university’s sophomore retention rates, job placement for graduate students and how much federal grant money is rewarded in peer-reviewed competitions.

“Our first obligation is to our community here – the students, the parents, taxpayers, the people of the state of Kansas – not to the U.S. News and to relative rankings,” he said.

KU leaders do tout the university being named one of 14 best buys in the country by the Fiske Guide to Colleges. And the National Survey of Student Engagement has consistently given KU high marks for how engaged students can become in academics, particularly while learning from faculty members who are also successful researchers.

“That’s a hard culture to achieve, and this place has done it really well,” Lariviere said.