Matthew Yglesias has a couple of posts on opposition to the US News college rankings, the first noting the phenomenon, and the second pointing to Kevin Carey’s work on better ranking methods. The problem with this is, I think he sort of misses the point of the objections.
Matt writes:
All that said, the very best way to deal a death-blow to this scheme would be for America’s colleges and universities to work together and with third parties to try to come up with some meaningful metrics for higher education performance. All magazines make lists, but the reason the college rankings are such a hit is that there’s nothing out there. Ordinal rankings are inherently kind of dumb, but higher education leaders both can and should come up with some kind of theory about what service they’re providing to students and some method of measuring how well they’re doing it. Since the schools don’t do anything like this themselves, and since their lobbyists are wildly opposed to having the government do it, the upshot has been to outsource the function to a struggling newsmagazine that deploys screwy formulae to boost sales.
I think this involves a misreading of the objection to the US News rankings. The problem is not just that the formula is screwy, the problem is that some people reject the entire premise of the process: that there is some globally meaningful ranking of colleges.
I think the problem many academics have with the US News rankings is not so much that they dislike the weights of the individual components, or the specific ordering of the results, but that they dislike the entire idea. Education is a highly individual thing, and a college that is the “best” by some set of pseudo-objective standards may not turn out to be a good fit for any particular student. By creating rank-ordered lists of schools, we end up driving some students to seek out places that aren’t actually good for them, just for the “prestige” associated with attending a higher-ranked school.
I think this is probably somewhat overblown– students make college decisions on the basis of factors that are much sillier than the US News rankings, and most of them turn out all right– but it’s not just a matter of jealousy on the part of lower-ranked schools. Some of the schools protesting the rankings– Dicinson and Reed colleges, for example– do just fine in the rankings.
Personally, I think the sort of things Kevin Carey talks about in the Washington Monthly article Matt cites are perfectly reasonable, and would have no real problem with those data being available. But it’s important to note that Matt’s suggestion that colleges come up with their own rankings isn’t likely to carry much weight with the people objecting.
To put it in political terms, telling these people “Make up your own rankings, then” is a little like telling anti-war Democrats “Fine, if you don’t like the surge plan, come up with your own plan to put more troops in Baghdad.” The problem isn’t that they dislike the details of the implementation, so much as that they reject the whole concept.