Let a Hundred Rankings Bloom

It’s become fashionable to argue that education cannot be truly measured objectively. Forbes Magazine can measure dollars, and football can deal with wins, but how do you measure something as complicated as a university?

Well you can’t, or at least not fully. But if success is to be rewarded, differences in the quality of schools have to be acknowledged. The reasons rankings exist at all is due to a great public need for information. If some colleges are better than others, how exactly is an uninformed person supposed to compare them? One might say that colleges must be judged subjectively or by how well they match individual preferences. But it’s difficult for prospective students to know what they want in a college, and so they are content with mere excellence. (It is for this very reason that many find themselves at Harvard.) Any measurement is inevitably incomplete, but any single way of looking at the world usually is. Yet if university rankings are conducted properly, they still have value, regardless of their limited perspective. The real rank offense, so to speak, is not with rankings themselves, but instead with the U.S. News & World Report monopoly on the rankings. This monopoly, in turn, encourages uniformity and disingenuous measures on the part of the schools and insecurity on the part of the applicants. Since rankings are going to exist anyway (and aren’t inherently appalling to begin with), we need more rankings, not less.

Historically, rankings have been, for the most part, a force for good. Before the first U.S. News rankings in 1983, schools did not systematically collect reliable data like selectivity and graduation rates, and those that did refused to make them public. By providing more information to parents, applicants, counselors, and universities themselves, college rankings demystified the admissions process to a large extent and became not only a useful, but perhaps even an entirely honorable, enterprise.

The real problem lies in the virtual monopoly on the attention of college-bound families that the influential U.S. News rankings hold. The rankings reach 11 million people and are the oldest and most standard “objective” comparative measure of universities. In second and third place come the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Washington Monthly rankings. Have you heard of either? Do college-bound seniors (and their ambitious parents) lustfully chant them in their sleep? The U.S. News rankings rule, and no other consistent, equally respected measure exists.

One benefit of more rankings is that colleges would tend less towards uniformity. For example, the U.S. News rankings give the highest faculty scores to colleges that hire full-time professors with the highest degrees in their fields. But this prioritizes research, not teaching, and so in order to rise in the rankings, colleges hire faculty not for teaching, but for research. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But when a single influential ranking defines success in one direction, schools that attempt divergence, or even balance, are pressured to conform for traveling another route. In this case, colleges are punished in the rankings for having better teachers, which could be a problem if one wished for students to learn.

Another gain from more rankings is decreasing the vast incentives for colleges to selectively report, or even misreport, student data. For example, many colleges, such as Northeastern University and Boston University, exclude the verbal SAT scores of their international students—traditionally low—but report their math scores—traditionally high. In another case, Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J., once overstated its SAT scores by more than 200 points. In 1993, even Harvard was found to have overstated its SAT scores by 15 points. Furthermore, a large component of the U.S. News rankings—25 percent—are peer rankings. In the November 2005 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Colin Diver, the president of Reed College, said that some schools routinely rated their peer institutions into the bottom tier so as to propel themselves upwards. A proliferation of rankings without peer evaluations might lead colleges to more honestly evaluate other institutions.

Finally, a proliferation of rankings would alleviate many students and their families of a great deal of pressure. Application season in elite America is a time of great suffering. Admissions porn litters the living rooms of millions of ambitious families, most of them in a state of nervous collapse. College-bound seniors exhaust saliva from the sheer fatigue of sealing envelopes, frantically competing for seats on the Great Meritocratic Conveyor Belt.

At the heart of this frenzy is the flawed assumption that the ladders are firmly runged. But the truth is that they could justifiably be reordered. New York University could be 35th on one ranking and 11th on the other; Harvard first on one and 12th on another. Different methodologies yield different results, and Harvard, for example, would presumably not win the highest points for undergraduate teaching. Perhaps it is also here that college-bound families will feel more satisfied with their station in life and not indulge in their more Darwinist impulses, as has been the case in recent years.

More rankings and better rankings are both needed if we are to breach the stasis of the U.S. News list. Indeed, a slough of rankings is the only appropriate response to the horrors of quantifying something as rich as a university. One ultimately hopes that the diversity of rankings will reflect the diversity of colleges.



Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.