Why the U.S. News Peer Survey Will Never Die, and Probably Shouldn't

The Yale Daily News reports that, in a "major statement," Yale refused to fill out the U.S. News & World Report college rankings peer reputation survey this year, while also refusing to join other private colleges and universities in signing a letter promising to boycott said survey. To begin, this is only true if by "major" you  mean "cautious, difference-splitting and not particularly important." Moreover, those who think the declining participation rate in the U.S. News survey will eventually render it inoperable and thus de-legitimize the rankings are kidding themselves, for two reasons. 

First, because U.S. News can always survey someone else. (Note: there's a nugget of conventional wisdom out there that U.S. News changes its methodology every year so the rankings will be shuffled and thus generate news. While there were changes in the past, this is at least the fifth or sixth consecutive year in which there have been virtually no alterations, so that meme should be laid to rest.)  

Second, because for every institution that's hurt by the survey, which makes up 25 percent of each college's score, another benefits and will thus likely continue filling out the form. And looking at which are which, the survey probably makes the rankings better, not worse. 

Among the "first tier" Top Fifty national universities, here are the ten with the biggest negative difference between their peer reputation ranking and overall ranking, with the ordinal difference in parentheses. In other words, these are the top schools whose U.S. News ranking most exceed the esteem of their peers:

Lehigh (-14)
Wake Forest (-13)
Emory (-12)
Notre Dame (-12)
University of Rochester (-12)
Tufts (-11)
Brandeis (-10)
Washington University in St. Louis (-8)
Rice (-7)
Boston College (-7)

Here are their counterparts on the flip side, those whose rankings are lower than the peer survey would indicate:

UNC-Chapel Hill (+10)
UC - Davis (+10)
Penn State (+10)
University of Florida (+10)
Georgia Tech (+11)
Washington University (+11)
University of Michigan (+13)
UC - Berkeley (+15)
UW - Madison (+15)
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (+16)
UT - Austin (+23)

The difference is obvious -- all of the over-ranked universities are private, while all of the under-ranked universities are public. That's because public universities, being large and on some level committed to enrolling a diverse student body, tend to fall short on other components of the rankings that favor a small, wealthy student body: alumni giving rates, percent of applicants who are rejected, median SAT scores, percent of students from the top 10 percent of their high school class, etc. 

While the peer survey is in many ways rooted in unexamined reputations that go back decades or more (and  the entire U.S. News methodology should of course be replaced with something completely different and much better), it at least has the effect of limiting the ability of universities to spend their way up the rankings through pure marketing and fundraising tactics. That's a good thing, and the reason you'll never see a Rose Bowl Coalition of Big Ten and Pac Ten universities joining the boycott.