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It feels like everybody is piling on US News and World Report’s College Rankings these days (and the new list doesn’t even come out until September). Earlier this month it was Malcolm Gladwell. Then came a petition on Change.org from educators who wrote an open letter to the publication asking it to stop using standardized test scores in their ranking criteria. This month, it is Professor Susan Paterno of Chatman University, who in a Washington Post article promoting her new book, Game On: Why College Admissions is Rigged, seems to blame the organization for all of higher education’s woes.
Paterno’s primary argument is that the US News Rankings have become the very measure by which colleges live and die and so doing well on those rankings has become an arms race among colleges. This has led them to unnecessarily spend hundreds of millions of dollars to keep up - a cost that is directly passed on to students, largely taken in the form of debt. I don’t think that Paterno is saying anything that is untrue - the rankings have become a cultural phenomenon that has changed the higher ed landscape. And college costs have increased tremendously over the last 40 years, at least partially due to the rankings game. But I’m not sure that any blame for this can be laid at the feet of US News. After all, they are just a magazine that created a ratings formula. They have no central authority and no official oversight of anything. All they have is the trust of consumers, who have decided that US News’ list, one of many that come out every year, is the one that matters. This really upsets many in academia, but I’m not sure there is a lot of logic as to why.
US News has no official oversight of anything so why do their rankings bother so many in academia?
As a people, we seem to love rankings. We make lists of the greatest songs and movies of all time. We rank the quality of automobiles and blenders. We use Yelp’s ratings and reviews when we need a plumber and we book our travel on sites that rank hotels by traveler satisfaction. Surely those businesses also invest so that they can keep up in the ratings race that matter to them. Yet I rarely hear the CEO of a major hotel chain complain about how TripAdvisor is bad for the public. Surely we don’t begrudge parents and students for evaluating a $300K+ investment decision, which is what four years at a private college can cost right now.
Perhaps it is because those in academia don’t believe they are a business (although certainly, the folks in the enrollment management department do). They see their primary goal as fostering the growth of young people and believe it is unfair to judge that tender endeavor as coldly as US News seems to do. The argument from them might be that the college purchase decision is more highly involved than most major investments and its return to the buyer is more nuanced. That prestige, which is what many believe US News is really ranking, is just one part of the college experience and that a list based on it is not worthy of being a college’s primary overlord. These are fair points, but the anger still feels misplaced. If you are a college president, why not differentiate on something other than the US News ranking? Lean in to what makes you unique as an institution and attract students with that value proposition. By definition, not everyone can win the prestige competition, so why not compete on some other field? Why not focus on job outcomes in particular sectors or in specific measures of happiness later in life? The answer, I suspect, is because most colleges are not differentiated in any meaningful way. They generally follow the same format, touting the same benefits and virtually identical list prices, regardless of their US News rankings. This is why so many also-ran colleges are closing every year, unable to attract students willing to pay for an experience that can’t be measured.
Someday, a better rating system will emerge and overtake US New in its usefulness, and perhaps even colleges will be happy about this. But I doubt it.
