The annual US News & World Report list of the top colleges in America was released earlier today, so I obviously opened the link the moment I saw the announcement and anxiously skimmed to see which of the high-teens Notre Dame landed at this year. That's about the moment I realized.
This list is toxic and should probably be discontinued. It does more harm than good.
Looking at it strictly for what it's intended to be — a high-level perspective of what the best schools in the nation are based on a standardized, wide-angled rubric — I think it actually does a pretty adequate job. Sure, I have some qualms with what exactly the ranking criteria is. I think including "Average Alumni Giving Rate" is utterly stupid. I think setting aside 20% of the ranking for a peer assessment of "Academic Reputation" probably only engenders school reputations that have lasted for decades rather than authentically coloring in the grey qualitative areas. I think "Social Mobility" should have more weight so schools can no longer get away with almost exclusively educating the wealthiest 10% of families in America. But am I saying a different criteria would be definitively better, or that there is something fundamentally wrong with the US News rubric? No. It's pretty solid all things considered.
If we accept that measuring all these performance indicators will inevitably compel colleges to improve these data points too, then the list is probably a valuable mechanism to push for positive change in important areas like freshmen retention rate and class size. As with any job, the closer you monitor KPIs, the better you normally do.
But where I think we start to run into more morally ambiguous territory is in how this list is interpreted by students. For high-achieving high school seniors, this list is the Bible. Teenagers are told from a very young age that they need to work as hard as they can in middle school and high school so that they can get into a "good college" without any serious notion of what a "good college" is. Well, this list answers that question. It not only names what the"good colleges" are, but it reveals precisely how each college compares to its brethren, a digital yard stick of sorts for measuring your own success against that of your peers.
And what is the result of this? Students making one of the most serious decisions of their lives based on an impersonal, standardized ranking criteria rather than their own personal academic needs. Students feeling pressured into Everest-sized mounds of debt when they get into a top-20 school that they "can't say 'no' to." Students feeling like they failed when they end up going to a school outside the top 50. Smaller private schools and state schools feeling like they have no leverage against the Ivy Leagues in the fight for young talent because they ranked too low. Students failing to consider extremely important factors like campus atmosphere and social fit into their college decision.
In essence, I think US News can decide what a "good school" is, but only the student can decide what the right school is for them, and these lists are too often putting students in a position where they conflate the two. Maybe the best school for your specific interest in how filmmakers use movies to advance social causes in America is North Carolina State University even if it's #72 on this year's list. Maybe getting into Princeton, this year's #1, will actually only burn you out by age 20 and put you on a career path that leaves you disillusioned with your professional life by age 23. US News can't make those calls, but we're increasingly giving it the authority to.
So to me, the decision on whether or not the list should be discontinued comes down to who the audience of this list is intended to be: the universities, or the students. And presuming it's the students and the general public, then yes, I think it should be discontinued. You don't publish something that fundamentally harms the people it's intended for. The corrosive power the list has on the decision making ability of high school seniors just isn't worth it.
Comments