@PurpleTitan Because no ranking system is perfect and there are better things to worry about for a college president. For example, Northwestern’s mission statement doesn’t say anything about US News ranking. BTW, I am not saying US News ranking is perfect…it is probably far from perfect. But there are many other ways to address/improve it (e.g. engaging with US News and/or other colleges).
Until about 7 years ago Boston University was the only National University that did not cooperate with USNews. They languished in the mid 50’s. They stated that rankings were useless at best, detrimental at worst. A new BU administration changed all that and now BU prominently trumpets is improved rankings in USNews and any other ranking they can find. They play the game by offering January admission for fall applicants, guaranteed sophomore transfer etc.
@fivesages - your logic is flawed. First, parchment rankings are completely absurd / flawed. For instance, do you believe that WUSTL wins 40% of cross-admits with Harvard and splits about 50/50 with UPenn? And Parchment claims that WUSTL wins against Dartmouth 57% of time. WUSTL’s yield is around 37% - I think this example on its own is enough to discredit Parchment. Second, US News rankings heavily influence cross-admit decisions among highly impressionable high school students. When I was applying to college in the late 1990s, UChicago had an acceptance rate close to 50% and a yield rate that was sub 40%. When Chicago’s US News ranking was in the 10-15 range, it was regularly losing cross admits to Northwestern, Duke and Cornell (I got into all 4 schools at the time by the way and chose Columbia). So, to summarize, the rankings serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy and heavily influence high school students. If Cornell, for instance, jumped into the top 10 this year and stayed there for the next 4-5 years, my guess is that its yield would skyrocket and it would start winning more cross-admits.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that many of the less attractive trends in US college admissions are driven by the desire to look good in the USNWR rankings. For example:
- soliciting massive numbers of applications, often on easy-to-submit forms with no supplemental essays and no application fees, just so there are more applicants to reject;
- admitting higher and higher percentages of applicants via ED, which guarantees a higher yield and therefore a lower overall acceptance rate;
- rejecting highly qualified applicants in the interests of "yield protection";
- going test-optional, so that low-scoring but otherwise desirable applicants (like athletes or children of wealthy donors) can be admitted without lowering the average range.
Another point to consider is that the ranking system discourages schools from adopting policies that could be beneficial, yet won’t have a positive rankings impact. For example, students rave about the Oxbridge-style upper-level tutorials at Williams College, which are capped at a maximum enrollment of two. I’ll bet that lots of students at other elite schools would love the opportunity to at least try a class like that. So why don’t more schools offer them?
Well, it’s obviously more expensive – and yet the expense would not be rewarded by USNWR. The rankings reward schools for classes “under 20” – but it makes no difference whether that means 19 students or just two. If 19 is small enough, why spend extra to go lower?
I get a feeling that Northwestern fell in the USNews ranking this year. The Administration realizes that this may create a lot of hand wringing and bad publicity for the University, so they are preemptively trying to discredit this specific ranking. Given the number of ties at spot 12 and spot 15, a few changes here and there could push NW 4-5 notches down. NW had a score of 89/100 and Vandy had a score of 85/100. There is not much room for error here. I think they may have tried to resolve this offline, but when they could not reach an agreement, the University decided to preemptively blunt the impact of a possible slip in the ranking.
NW administration is miffed at how the ranking turned out this year. Whether you like it or not, alums, trustees and current and future students care about the rankings. A slip could affect alum giving rates, and may even affect the president’s pay.
If a highly-ranked school like Northwestern (National Universities #12) isn’t in a position to criticize the USNWR ranking system, then who is?
Would it better if the criticism came from a low-ranked school, say the University of Illinois-Chicago (National Universities #152)? No, because in that case the response would be “Well, of course UIC doesn’t like the system, their ranking sucks.”
So if a high-ranked school like Northwestern is not in a position to criticize the system, and a low-ranked school like UIC is not in a position to criticize the system, then what school (if any) is permitted to be critical?
In my mind, only three schools have the brand permission to criticize the USnews ranking: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, because no matter what USnews says, these schools are the top three schools in terms of prestige in everybody’s mind. Their standing in the ranking is of no consequence to them. If Harvard fell to 15 in any ranking, it is the ranking that would be suspect, not Harvard. If Stanford came out at #12 in any ranking, it would immediately call into question the credibility of the ranking. That is how strong the brand reputation of these schools is at the current time. Every other school that criticizes USnews or any other ranking for that matter, looks like it is simply whining.
With USnews it is specially hard for the other universities to criticize without sounding like whiners, because their ranking maps quite closely to the “biases and prejudices that the lay person already has about different schools”, so their ranking “seems” more legitimate, compared to a Washington Monthly ranking.
One other possibility for NW’s displeasure, may be that they stayed the same but one of the schools that Schapiro really dislikes got a good boost in the ranking. Knowing his politics, I can guess which schools these might be. He probably believes that compared to “that/those school/s”, NW is much better or at least as good, and since the USNews ranking doesn’t reflect that, it clearly is not up to snuff.
Good conspiracy theory 
It would have make sense had the article just been written at that time (it is possible USNWR releases rankings to University administration a bit ahead of releasing it to general public, though 2 weeks ahead seems quite a lot). But the article is taken from the book that was released a couple of months back (and certainly, the book would have taken a while to write). Moreover, the book is based on class notes of a class the two authors have taught together.
The idea that 4-5 places represents anything significant in terms of a difference is silly (in terms of reality not in the CC world). And the idea that only Harvard, Stanford or MIT can be critical of the USNews process without sounding like whiners is even sillier (again reality rather than this place).
@fivesages
I am sure NU president knows how to prioritize his time better than most people; he doesn’t need you to tell him. Your ad hominem attack seems so unnecessary. Besides, the article is reflecting his own opinion, not necessarily Northwestern’s.
@pupflier
It’s often a poor practice to speculate or focus on people’s motive on a discussion board.
Right, so here’s what I don’t get:
If someone says that no ranking system is perfect, then why does that same someone then ferociously attack another person for pointing out flaws in a ranking system? Wouldn’t that someone expect ranking systems to be criticized?
@IWannaHelp I am not attacking anyone…I am just expressing my opinion:)
@PurpleTitan Here is where that article/opinion misses…
- Any rankings, let alone college rankings, have inherent flaws or defects because they are based on a select criteria. One of the reasons why multiple rankings exist.
- It assumes that high school students (and parents & counselors) won’t be able to differentiate between a college rank and what’s best for them based on myriad of other factors.
“It assumes that high school students (and parents & counselors) won’t be able to differentiate between a college rank and what’s best for them based on myriad of other factors.”
If you have been on CC awhile, I’m sure you have seen just massive numbers of students (and some parents) who take the USNews rankings as unquestioned gospel. BTW, if anything, that’s even more true outside CC (in the “real” world).
@pupflier wrote, “In my mind, only three schools have the brand permission to criticize the USnews ranking: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, because no matter what USnews says, these schools are the top three schools in terms of prestige in everybody’s mind.”
This statement only goes to show how subjective any supposedly “objective” ranking system is bound to be. The “consensus top-3” of Harvard/Stanford/MIT in fact reflects a post-tech-boom bias that not everybody shares. People who are somewhat older and whose notions of academic excellence are determined more by prowess in the humanities and social sciences than by how likely a school’s grads are to succeed in the world of Silicon Valley start-ups will have a different perspective. For them, Stanford and MIT will probably never dislodge HYP from the “top-3” slots.
Hence if the criterion which allows for legitimate for criticizing of USNWR is to possess an unassailable degree of top-of-the-heap prestige, then only Harvard–if even Harvard!–would be dubbed “worthy” to question the methodology that underwrites the rankings system . . . a system has only been around since the 1980s. Harvard, I believe, considerable predates that system, and it is in fact only one of many of American colleges and universities that have been teaching students for decades–and, in some case, for centuries–before USNWR appeared on the scene.
The notion that some of the best educational institutions in the world should for any reason feel compelled to abase themselves before a collection of marketers, statisticians, and journalists strikes me as absurd.
pupflier, if the Methodology is flawed, and if the US News ranking does a poor job of auditing the data for consistency and accuracy, then any university, and/or person is free to criticize it.
It’s not much of a challenge to pick apart any ranking system. The reason people focus on USNWR is because it’s the most well known, not because it’s particularly worse than the others.
@PurpleTitan While you may be correct about CC community, I think rank is a dominant factor only at the very top. After that it tends go more into ranges. For example, yield rate for schools like Northwestern tend to hover around 50% or below…these schools loose out to top public schools (e.g. UC Berkeley) and the top liberal arts schools (e.g. Williams, Amherst). So I don’t think ranking is a driving factor after the top 10 or so when it comes to most of the high school students.
By statistics, Northwestern – last year ranked 12th in its U.S. News category – will fall into the 10-14 range this year (excepting a methodology change). Suggestions up-thread of a concerted, anticipatory defense on behalf of NU would appear to be fanciful.
A better question is why does Northwestern even care? They’re a prestigious university, is the administration, or its alumni, that insecure?