Malcolm Gladwell Trashes College Rankings

[SFwildcat]

<p>Did anyone read the February double issue of the New Yorker in which Gladwell criticizes USNews college rankings? I found it very insightful and I agreed with many of the points he makes. It is rather foolish to think any formula or metric can accurately summarize the academic learning environments. Thoughts?</p>

<p>link
Malcolm</a> Gladwell Trashes College Rankings | eWallstreeter
What</a> College Rankings Really Tell Us : The New Yorker</p>

[LasMa]

<p>Amen and amen!</p>

<p>

There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution, so the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best.

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<p>

There are schools that provide a good legal education at a decent price, and, by choosing not to include tuition as a variable, U.S. News has effectively penalized those schools for trying to provide value for the tuition dollar. The U.S. News ranking turns out to be full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. It gives twice as much weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness.

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[japanoko]

<p>

There are schools that provide a good legal education at a decent price, and, by choosing not to include tuition as a variable, U.S. News has effectively penalized those schools for trying to provide value for the tuition dollar. The U.S. News ranking turns out to be full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. It gives twice as much weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness.

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<p>If you include tuition as a variable, you would have to include financial aid - resulting in net cost. Due to the substantial financial aid packages offered by the Yale’s of the world, these schools would solidify their top rankings even further.</p>

<p>The Yale model is ranked higher than the Penn State model in the rankings - further underscoring the success of students that have learned through the Yale model versus those coming out of the Penn State model.</p>

[ucbalumnus]

<p>Trying to throw price into any kind of ranking makes rankings even less transparent, since universities practice price discrimination by giving need and merit financial aid so that every student sees a different set of prices for different universities. Of course, “quality” also differs for each individual student, and no single ranking system can approximate every student’s needs and preferences.</p>

[tk21769]

<p>Gladwell’s complaints are legitimate but overstated.
Take out the Peer Assessment from USNWR rankings, base them only on “objective” measurements, and you still wind up with roughly similar results. Compare the USNWR rankings with the numbers-driven stateuniversity.com rankings. Yes, there are some movements of many places up or down, but overall, the results aren’t all that different. If you leave cost out (which you really need to do to assess the quality of nearly anything), the various metrics tend to be mutually corroborating.</p>

<p>This is especially true if you relax the precision. One-up integer rankings far overstate the degree of precision that is reasonable to expect for college rankings. A more rational presentation would be to show overlappiing clusters of N schools. I don’t know what the right value of N is, maybe 5 or 10 or 20. Whatever it is, applicants should look for the right “fit” within a cluster that matches their abilities, and not worry too much about fine differences of overall quality within that group or neighboring schools in an adjacent group. Many applicants probably use the rankings this way already.</p>