<p>Much has been written and discussed about the inaccuracy of college ranking schemes and the irrationality of our cultural over-dependence on them.</p>
<p>Malcolm Gladwell has penned an excellent piece in which he makes the point that it's impossible to create a non-misleading ranking system that is both heterogeneous and comprehensive (i.e. that maintains a sensible degree of "truth" while being both broad and deep in its scope).</p>
<p>I thought the article was an excellent treatment of the subject. As usual, Gladwell nails it.</p>
<p>Gladwell’s article may be a couple years old, but its content - revealing shortcomings of the USNWR methodology - is very valuable for current students who may make false judgements by treating those rankings as the Bible.</p>
<p>Most useful: revealing the methodology criteria, explaining how selectivity reinforces itself, showing how imprecise the “reputation” scoring process is, showing how rankings drive reputation in an endless cycle, showing how many criteria that should be important in selecting a college (quality of UG classroom experience, quality of teaching, accessibility of profs, satisfaction of students with their college) are absent from the USNWR formula.</p>
<p>^ Forbes has tried to measure student satisfaction with the “rate my professor” surveys. The results? Using a completely different approach (which also considers post-graduation success), Forbes arrives at almost exactly the same set of top 10 universities as US News (albeit in a somewhat different order and interleaved with LACs). QS World University Rankings, using yet another approach, also arrives at a similar set of top universities.</p>