<p>The USNews is all over the place in terms of what it is they <em>say</em> they supposed to be measuring. The first couple of times they were published, the annual college rankings consisted solely of what later came to be known as the Peer Assessment poll, a ranking based on which institutions college presidents and deans chose as the best colleges in the country. </p>
<p>When those were criticized for being mere “beauty contests” (basically the same criticism of the PA scores have been around for nearly 25 years, now), Mel Elfin (Bob Morse’s predecessor) came up with a lot of the bells and whistles we see now except that, for all their precision, they are, pretty much, all proxies for the same thing: how much money a college spends per student. </p>
<p>Sure, spending coincides with quality to some extent, but, in reality, it’s a little bit like ranking a car by how costly it is to manufacture and the unintended result over the past twenty years seems to have been a lot of wasteful spending, especially at the LAC level.</p>