First, Yale Law School. Now, Harvard Medical School. One by one, some of the nation’s top graduate programs are quitting the great who’s-up-who’s-down scorecards of higher ed: US News & World Report’s rankings.
(Bloomberg) — First, Yale Law School. Now, Harvard Medical School. One by one, some of the nation’s top graduate programs are quitting the great who’s-up-who’s-down scorecards of higher ed: US News & World Report’s rankings.
Harvard, No. 1 on the publication’s latest medical-school list for research, joins a growing boycott of the most famous name in US college rankings. This week, the medical schools of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania announced they will no longer participate. Yale kicked off the movement in November, and was followed soon after by Harvard, Penn and Georgetown University law schools.
The big question now is whether the movement will trickle down to undergraduate institutions. Critics of the rankings say their methodology is flawed and fail to represent the student experience, while supporters argue the lists are valuable guides for students. While this may put pressure on undergraduate colleges to reconsider their participation, those who study the rankings say the exodus might take some time.
Love ’em or hate ’em, they exert a powerful hold over institutions, students, parents and even recruiters. For some schools, sliding in the rankings can mean lost funding.
Undergraduate schools have been tight-lipped about what happens next, although many admissions officers privately question the rankings’ value. The criticism has been mounting for years.
“I am convinced that the rankings game is a bit of mishegoss — a slightly daft obsession that does harm when colleges, parents, or students take it too seriously,” Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber wrote in a 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post.
In August, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called rankings “a joke.”
Yale Law School’s decision to stop participating in the magazine’s rankings was made independently and “does not preclude Yale University or other schools at Yale from submitting data to other ranking systems,” Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for the school in New Haven, Connecticut, said in an emailed statement.
Bloomberg publishes its own business-school rankings.
The Methodology
The assault on the rankings mostly addresses their methodology. For its most recent “Best Colleges Rankings,” US News & World Report assessed “17 indicators of academic quality.” Graduation and retention rates accounted for 22% of the calculation, followed by undergraduate academic reputation and faculty resources for the 2021-22 academic year, each weighted at 20%.
These metrics, among others, have no clear correlation to the quality of education or the student experience, said Angel Perez, chief executive officer of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. In addition, they do little to capture the vast array of undergraduate institutions and tend to favor wealthier schools, he said.
“Most people have no idea what the formula is,” Perez said. Yet, the obsession with the rankings is still deeply ingrained in the higher-education system.
Perez, who worked on college campuses for more than a decade, recalls attending college fairs where families would walk around with copies of the US News rankings. “If you were 50 and below, they would talk to you,” he said. “And if you weren’t, they would walk away.”
This fixation on the rankings has pushed some schools to pay close attention to the methodology and strategically allocate resources to improve their standing, said Michael Sauder, a sociology professor at the University of Iowa and co-author of Engines of Anxiety, which examines the mechanics of law school rankings.
“Sometimes they changed how they distributed their scholarship money,” he said. “Sometimes they changed how they counted who was employed and who wasn’t employed. Sometimes they spent a lot more money on marketing to get their reputation scores up.”
Last year, Columbia University math Professor Michael Thaddeus questioned the accuracy of the data the New York City school submitted to the magazine. Columbia, which later said the data were inaccurate, tumbled to No. 18 from No. 2 on US News’s list of best undergraduate colleges.
Read more: Columbia Law, Georgetown Join Exodus From U.S. News Rankings
“I have to keep reminding people this ranking does nothing to measure the quality of teaching or scholarship inside the institution,” Thaddeus said. “It’s based on these other factors that are quite extraneous, like the percentage of alumni who make donations or the amount of administrative spending.”
A rebel among its peers is Reed College, a private liberal arts school that withdrew from the rankings in the 1990s. At the time, Reed put out a call to other colleges to do the same, but it didn’t lead to any sort of mass exodus, said Reed President Audrey Bilger.
“This is the first time we’ve witnessed waves of top-tier institutions stepping away from the rankings,” Bilger said. “Although it’s medical schools or law schools, not the undergraduate pieces of institutions that are stepping away, this puts pressure on everyone who is participating to question the value of doing so.”
A spokeswoman for US News & World Report declined to comment beyond a Jan. 18 statement from Eric Gertler, the magazine’s CEO, who was responding to Harvard’s decision.
“We know that comparing diverse academic institutions across a common data set is challenging,” he said in the statement. “That is why we have consistently stated that the rankings should be one component in a prospective student’s decision-making process.”
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