The College Fix

Edward Fiske claims that the much-watched U.S. News annual college rankings aren’t nearly important as many believe:

1. The U.S. News asks the wrong question. The question is not what is the “best” school by some abstract standard, but what is the best school for you. Harvard is a great place for lots of super-bright students, but if at the age of 17 you could still benefit from a bit of stroking, try Swarthmore, Carleton or Pomona.

2. They only look at inputs. U.S. News asks colleges about the resources they enjoy, including the academic quality of the students they admit. But the formula pays no attention to results. Does the college do a good job of educating its students? The rankings have no way of saying.

3. They don’t tell you anything really important. When you get to the point of actually deciding among several schools, you want to know about things like whether faculty care about teaching, how competitive the academic climate is and whether you are likely to be comfortable with the kind of students it attracts. Don’t look to the rankings for any help here.

4. The rankings are really measures of institutional wealth. By emphasizing factors such as endowment per student and faculty resources, the formula favors private schools, especially smaller ones, with big endowments. If you think that institutional wealth automatically translates into academic quality, I have a football stadium that you might like to buy.

5. They are biased against public universities. U.S. News used to have a good mix of public and private institutions in its lists of top schools, but over the years the proportion of publics, which educate more than 75 percent of college students, has declined. Are we really to believe, as the rankings released today suggest, that there are no publics among the top 20 national universities in this country. Of course, one reason for the anti-public bias is obvious (see #4).

Read the full article at Minding the Campus.

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