“What their students will learn, if they're paying attention, is a life lesson in cynicism: how eminent authorities cloak their self-interest in high-sounding, deceptive rhetoric.”It is highly likely that there are self-interested motivations behind this decision. The presence of ulterior motives, however, does not change the fact that the rhetoric may, to a certain extent, be true. In the case of the U.S. News rankings, a little information could be a dangerous thing.
I decided where to go to college two years ago based upon many of the U.S. News criteria: percentage of small classes, acceptance rate, and retention rate. I got lucky. None of these factors quantify why Brown University has actually been a good fit for me. The majority of the reasons that I love Brown are things I knew nothing about before I arrived; the potential for a large 10am lecture to be dynamic, or the impact of a school’s grading system on its overall academic culture.
The statistics are not going away. They will live on in books, college brochures and college counseling offices, and they do have their place in the application process. But the U.S. News suggestion that colleges can be summarized and ranked by these characteristics alone does more to add to the clutter of the admissions process than to sort through it. Placing colleges and universities on such an absolute scale perpetuates the misconception that there is a universal set of wealth and prestige based qualities that make a school better or worse for every student.
Let students pick a school that is number one on something that will actually matter to them once they get there - whether that is one of the U.S. News variables or the number of on campus coffee shops. They really are up to the challenge.
(For more on potential alternatives to the U.S. News paradigm, see Kevin Carey’s article, “College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education”)
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