WRHU has fallen from the first ranked college radio station in the nation to the third on the Princeton Review’s “Best College Radio Station” list, behind fellow New York institutions Ithaca College and Fordham University. WRHU was ranked at the top of this list for two years in a row, and has won the National Association of Broadcasters’ Marconi Award, yet this year has been different.
This year, WRHU was a finalist for the “Non-commercial Station of the Year” Marconi Award, but lost to Seton Hall University’s station – WSOU-FM. WRHU still advertises itself as the No. 1-ranked college radio station and some members seem to be unaware of the change.
“I’m shocked because it’s always been drilled in my mind that we were number one and would be for a while,” said Ellen Boyle, a sophomore video/TV business major, after hearing of the change in ranks.
Faculty did seem to know about the shift in rankings more than the student body and the stations members. John Mullen, the director of operations for WRHU, when asked for comment on the new ranking, did not have a reaction to the news, in either direction.
Instead, Mullen pointed to the “outstanding work” done by a team comprised of mainly students and asserted that there is vast student support for the station. Mullen also brought up the relationship that the station has with the New York Islanders and the fact that both CBS and ESPN have used 88.7FM’s feed.
He called WRHU, “The only student operated station that is syndicated,” and explained, “Fordham has very little student participation in their program.”
The Princeton Review relies on student responses to 80 questions broken into four sections. To create the rankings for best college radio station, the survey asked students, “How popular is the college radio station?” Students answered by selecting one of five choices that range across a grid or scale.
This grid scale can range from “very popular” to “unpopular.” According to The Princeton Review, this answer choice five-point scale – which is called a Likert scale – is the most commonly used measurement for this type of survey research.
“We tallied the rankings lists in the current edition, ‘The Best 381 Colleges’ (published August 2016), based on the data from our surveys of 143,000 students at the 381 schools in the book,” The Princeton Review said on its website.
The institution gives each college a score for students’ answers to each question which they use to provide a base in comparing college to college.
The new lower ranking of WRHU suggests that Hofstra students do not support the station as much as they previously had. However, the rankings rely on voluntary responses, which can often lead to biased data. These responses do not consider outside achievements or quality in broadcasting.
Students seem to continue to support WRHU despite the new ranking. When asked whether the new ranking changed his opinion of WRHU, Trent Campbell, a sophomore film/TV production major replied, “Not even a little.”
Bernard Dennler, a senior and WRHU’s station manager, echoed both the students and Mullen’s feelings. He expressed his pride over the constant student participation the station has always adhered to and of the relationship WRHU has with its Long Island audience.
He said, “We believe [WRHU] makes our students better prepared than anyone else in the industry to make the transition from college radio to careers in broadcast journalism in all its forms – and we have the alums to prove it.”