College rankings, like those of US News and World Report, remain influential, despite their many flaws and decades of criticism

Filed 1h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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As I Figure

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

This year's U.S. News Best Colleges rankings put MIT atop national universities and Williams first among liberal arts colleges, while Princeton lost its 15-year hold on the research-university top spot. The piece, written by an Amherst political science professor whose school remains stuck behind archrival Williams, traces the rankings back through 1911 and 1935 predecessors and notes that Columbia, Reed and Sarah Lawrence have all stopped feeding U.S. News their numbers.

The author acknowledges the standard complaints — that rankings reward wealth and prestige over teaching quality, and that Yale Law School dropped out in 2002 over incentives that discourage public-interest careers. Still, the piece lands on the rankings functioning like a corporate audit, offering visibility to less prestigious schools and a form of public accountability.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

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A professor at a school ranked second for over a decade writing in defense of the ranking system is the kind of thing you notice, the way you'd notice the fox filing a report on henhouse security. The rankings might do some good for a small college nobody's heard of, sure. But when the sales pitch and the self-interest line up this neatly, a reader's entitled to squint a little.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: As I Figure · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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