College Rankings Return

The NYTimes goes to Florida to explore the problems and contradictions of public universities trying to climb the greased pole that is the U.S. News & World Report rankings system. Leaders from the University of Florida explain why it's important to jack up tuition by $1,000 in order to move from being the 13th-ranked public university in the country to the Top 10:

“Florida wants a top-10 university because it’s clear that our economic development is increasingly tied to research,” said Dr. Machen, the president.

Manny A. Fernandez, chairman of the board at the University of Florida, talks as frankly as Dr. Machen about rankings.

“I want to be on the cocktail-party list of schools that people talk about, because that influences the decisions of great students and great faculty,” Mr. Fernandez said. “I don’t apologize for trying to get the rankings up, because rankings are a catalyst for changes that improve the school.”

As is always the case when higher education leaders try to explain why the want to move up in the rankings, these comments say a lot about where their priorities truly lie. What you won't find in this article, and this is very typical, is anyone saying something along the lines of, "We're doing this because it will result in a higher quality education for our students." It's always, "the state will benefit from the research" or "we'll get 'better' students to enroll" or "the alumni will donate more."

The unquestioned assumption is that if faculty with great research reputations work there, and students with high SAT scores enroll there, it's a good school. The problem is that this assumption is plainly illogical--faculty often build up their scholarly credentials at the expense of teaching, and colleges should be judged based on how much their student learn while they attend college, not how much the learned before they got there. Institutional selectivity as a mark of quality is completely self-reinforcing--students will go to whichever institution is hardest to get into, because that's what selective universities are selling: a diploma that tells the world, "I got in."

For an explanation of why the U.S. News rat race is bad for higher education and how we could create a new rankings system to channel the ambitions of institutions like the University of Florida to more productive purposes, click here.