<p>Anyone visited the on-line version recently? Any pretense of providing easy access to large amounts of data for cross-institution comparison is gone. The default view is simply a ranked list of colleges with pictures and a 2-sentence blurb. Clicking on a “rankings data” tab produces a list with just a handful of data points (at least peer assessment is not there any more). As before, you can bore down several levels to a lot of CDS data, and by setting up customized IPEDS style lists of favorite schools you can do a lot of comparing. Still, the new layout makes even more clear that it’s the allure of the numerical rankings and not access to information that they’re hawking. As others have noted, if you’re after data, IPEDs, College Board, UCAN, et al. will provide that for free.</p>
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<p>Nah, nothing nearly so grand. The point is to make some money.</p>
<p>Look at it this way: if it makes them money they’ll do the rankings no matter what their status as “aribiters” of education. But if it had somehow enshrined them as educational arbiters but didn’t make them any money, they’d have dropped the rankings faster than you can say “Tier 1.” In that scenario rankings would gone extinct long before the current college students were even born.</p>
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<p>That just proves my point; the publishers of USNews would have to have been colossal failures at business not to to make money in that scenario. The biggest advantage they have over, let’s say, the Carnegie Foundation, is that foundations and non-profits attach an enormous amount of integrity to their studies – it’s basically all they do – too much is on the line for them to incorporate their planned obsolescence in so little space of time as a calendar year. Even the Revealed Preference Poll (RPP), another non-profit study, only comes out every few years.</p>
<p>[cont’d] So, USNews outcompetes the education lobby on two levels: 1) by underpricing them and, 2) by outproducing them. A monkey could do that. In fact, they’re worse than monkeys – they’re leeches: they manufacture desire without producing a single additional unit of educational infrastructure or human capital to meet that desire. they just make money off it.</p>
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<p>Yeah, so what’s wrong with that? As I noted earlier, they are a for-profit company and have never pretended otherwise. I don’t recall them ever claiming to be a non-profit organization, governmental agency, or educational foundation.</p>
<p>If they can make a lot of money devising and selling a college ranking system, I say more power to them. USNews puts a lot of effort into this particular enterprise. And free people are voting with their dollars here. If people didn’t value the USNews rankings they wouldn’t buy the mags or pay for the on-line access.</p>
<p>I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it: they’re no better than the so-called, investment bankers, hedge-funds and mortgage brokers who periodically think they can get ahead of the game by slicing and dicing something out of nothing. They do nothing constructive and distort the markets in ways that the little guy further down the food chain winds up paying for. </p>
<p>In the case of higher education, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars in wasteful spending that shows up as “expenditures per student” in the annual USNews thoroughly gerrymandered, weighted scoring (this is especially true in the National Liberal Arts colleges category); an upper middle-class that is being priced out of the very institutions that were virtually synonymous with upper-middle-class entitlement just a generation ago; and a lower-middle class that is being double-whammied 1) because colleges are less willing to take chances on losing their place in the poll by admitting students below their median SAT/ACT scores and, 2) because they cost more in financial aid (which as price-discounting, isn’t even counted as an expenditure in many college financial statements.)</p>
<p>“But I’ll be damned if I know fiske’s criteria for inclusion - it makes USNWR look like the model of transparency. No one makes a fuss about Fiske though.”</p>
<p>I too have found the books to be at least as flawed as USN&WR - - but each provides some useful data, so I have used them all. If you find the ranking unhelpful, don’t use it. (Though based on the number of ranking threads - - my current favorite being the lament b/c D’s prep sch is not on someone’s top 20 list - - plenty of folks the rankings/lists.)</p>
<p>[Cross posted with johnswesley, but same sentiment] The problem is not really on the consumer side; it’s that that USNEWS has become a major force in the way higher education operates, and not only in admissions. To make it concrete, we probably all know someone who, because rankings exist:</p>
<p>-was well qualified and interested in a college, but denied admission because they were considered unlikely to enroll
-was denied or deferred because a college was loading up with kids from the ED rounds and waitlist to raise their selectivity on paper
-was bumped from a class capped at 19 because that’s the USNEWS cutoff
-paid more tuition because the rankings contribute to an arms race of spending by rewarding it
-was encouraged to apply to a school at which they had no chance of admission
-was passed over in favor of other candidates, despite clear academic potential, because of low standardized test scores</p>
<p>and the list goes on.</p>
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<p>So what is your solution to this scourge? Sue in federal court to have college rankings declared unconstitutional? Have congress pass a law making it a felony to ship copies of the USNews college issue across state lines?</p>
<p>Seems to me that, through cleverness or dumb luck, the USNews people hit upon an idea and created a product that filled a need. Millions of people have found their college rankings to be useful and are willing to pay money for them. If people don’t like the rankings or they determine that their bad effects outweigh the good, they’ll stop paying attention to them - and more importantly they’ll stop paying money for them. In which case USNews will drop them like a rock. It’s called free enterprise.</p>
<p>The solution is to boycott all hardcopies of the magazine (which most people do anyway) but, to most especially NOT buy it when the college rankings come out – or when ANY of their rankings come – aren’t we all a little bored by those special editions by now?</p>
<p>The online version, with its interactive apps sounds like it might be worth the money, but, as others have pointed out, you can compile much of the same information yourself.</p>
<p>Look, if the tech-savvy young people of Egypt can bring down Mubarak, we here in the U.S.A can do the same thing to a far more benign tyranny.</p>
<p>Once upon a time, even the Ivies were regional universities. Before the baby boom, college graduates comprised what portion of the working population? 10%? So the college information networks were relatively small and local. Word of mouth or family legacies provided all the information a HS senior needed to make a choice. </p>
<p>College admission is now more than ever a national marketplace. Rankings have both responded to and facilitated this change. Without something like a ranking system, how would anyone looking across the whole national landscape for a college (especially a first gen or international student) know where to begin? </p>
<p>You can easily obtain information directly from the colleges, but you are unlike to do that for hundreds of them. More likely, you’ll start with the slice of USNWR schools that more or less bracket your stats.</p>
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<p>This isn’t the fault of USNews, it’s the fault of the university. They could hire additional faculty to add classes and still keep the cap at 19, if the desire is to keep small class sizes. And many agree that smaller class sizes are better, so this is one where you can’t entirely put the blame on USNews. </p>
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<p>Hmm…there is this whole argument here on CC and elsewhere whether or not test scores demonstrate academic potential. And to see the horrified reaction of some here on CC when a kid with ‘low stats’ gets accepted to ‘Prestigious U’, it’s clear that many believe that admissions should be more stats based.</p>
<p>How about getting rid of GPA as evidence of academic potential? I know lots of kids with low GPA and high test scores; many of these kids took a bit longer to mature in high school. I would hope that admissions would take a chance on these kids as well, learning from the test scores that they, too, have academic potential and that their best years are ahead of them. </p>
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<p>I know this idea gets a lot of play around here on CC and elsewhere, and it may seem logical, but I have never seen any evidence for fewer upper middle class students in higher education, or, restricting it to the Top 20 USNews rankings, fewer upper middle class students at these institutions. I have yet to see any evidence for a ‘bimodal’ distribution of students at these institutions, being reserved only for the very rich or under 60K crowd. Perhaps there is something out there to show this.</p>
<p>Tk21769 - you’re assuming people in Kansas had no way of knowing about Harvard before USNews came around. That can’t possibly be true: yes, there’s a national market for Ivy League and other prestigious colleges; the market demand has probably doubled in just the period since the last laissez-faire rankings were created: [College</a> Admissions Help from College Confidential.com - college-rankings - College Confidential](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_rankings/LF_rank.htm]College”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_rankings/LF_rank.htm)</p>
<p>Where USNews has had its most pernicious influence is in concentrating demand for the same top fifteen private universities year after year, pretty much at the expense of 1) flagship state universities and 2) the so-called, national LACs (a rather condescending category bracketed out by USNews), the net long-term effect of which has been to diminish the prestige of the only real competition the Ivy League ever had. </p>
<p>As for whether there’s a national market for the third and fourth tier colleges that populate the bulk of the magazines pages? I’m an agnostic about that. I don’t sense any indication that people in one section of the country need tutoring about the existence of a third or fourth tier institution located 500 miles away from home. They’re not called regional colleges for nothing.</p>
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<p>Knock yourself out. I sincerely wish you good luck. Like I said, when people stop paying for the rankings they will soon go away. If you can convince people to quit funding the rankings more power to you. But in the meantime the rankings mania continues.</p>
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<p>Apparently not. One of the hottest recurring topics on CC every year are the many threads and posts speculating about and predicting the new USNews rankings before they come out and discussing them endlessly when they do. Boredom does not seem to have set in at all.</p>