Levin said that although he disagrees with the magazine’s misleading use of quantitative measures to evaluate schools, he would not support a movement to eliminate college rankings completely. “If the letter says abolish any attempt by the press to characterize strong versus weak colleges, I would be opposed to that,” Levin said. “Schools have to be accountable, and it’s part of our tradition of free press to have external evaluators of the performance of our schools.”
On the one hand, this is refreshing. Condemnation of U. S. News is a mandatory part of polite conversation in higher education policy circles, the kind of "of course we all agree" thing you say as a preface to some other point. That's because higher education likes to operate on the polite fiction that every college and university is equally good in its own special way, that there's a fine college out there for every student, and that the whole admissions process is--or should be--just about finding the right "fit" between sui generis colleges and equally unique students. The whole idea of evaluating institutional quality on a common scale or in a comparable way is felt to be a betrayal of some higher ideal.
This is, of course, nonsense, and it's good to hear a college president say so publicly, and to even utter the "A-word"--accountability--in the process. It doesn't happen very often.
On the other hand, Yale's interest in the U.S. News rankings is obvious. It would be weird for them to boycott a rankings system that annually tells the world something that they surely believe is true: Yale and its Ivy League ilk are the greatest. While the U.S. News rankings are based on a complex, multi-variable formula, they're best understood as a relatively straightforward process of determining degrees of difference from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. The more like them you are, the higher you're ranked.
The problem is that most institutions, particularly public institutions, aren't meant to be like Ivy League schools, and it's silly to rate them in that way. So if Yale really wanted to help topple the U.S. News regime--which can't be accomplished by a boycott, since it's a free country and U.S. News can publish whatever it likes, plus most of the data used in its rankings are publicly available and can't be witheld by colleges even if they wanted to--then Yale should take the bold step of proposing and then participating in some process whereby it publicly discloses how well it teaches its students and how much they actually learn while they're in college. That would be a revolution.
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