I spent my college years at UC Irvine, just as it was beginning to develop into the juggernaut it most unmistakenly is now. In the words of George W. Bush “Go Anteaters…. Fight… Anteater”. It most certainly wasn’t rankings that attracted me in 1988. I had acceptances from a number of schools that would have looked great on the old resume. But UCI went the extra mile to get me to go there. I swear, if we’d had cell phones and pagers in 1988, it would have been worse than having Pete Carroll and Les Miles fight over a letter of intent.

The best result would be to provide a number of separate metrics or rankings within groups of schools (public/private, small/large, etc.) instead of a single scale. Then as a college student, I could look at the factors most interesting to me.

I graduated from a school that was small enough to get individual teacher attention yet with affordable tuition because student aid wouldn’t cover the gap between what my parents could afford and what the Univ of California cost. I’ve later spent some time on the UC campus and am happy with the choice I made for undergrad, even though it might not have been a good idea based on the US News ranking alone.

Anyone interested in collaborating with me can email me at lawfinals@yahoo.com

A student selecting a college and a company selecting employees are very different situations. A poor selection has a much larger impact on a student (have to try – and likely fail – to transfer after an unpleasant year) than on a company (replace the employee, incur a small cost). The student only decides once while the company hires many people, which both amplifies the importance of the decision to the student and means the student can invest much more effort in making the decision than the company can in each employee.

Hiding scores because of graduation rate *is* a significant thing, thank you very much. There are real students who break down or give up in college, and it is a useful bit of information to know how many of them there are. Otoh, I don’t see the meaning in flunking a kid that was admitted rightfully, and who hasn’t slacked off. The US has been more accomodating than Cambridge-style “sent down the river”. Setting aside the money reason, I have to think this is the better way.

Students also only get to go to one college (in most cases). Colleges could appear in multiple ranking lists simultaneously.

One possibility is, rather than just trying to opt out of the ranking in useless news and world distort, for colleges to encourage other publications to publish rankings with criteria they prefer.

There’s also a difference in importance – grades don’t matter much after a few years in most careers.

The Thomas Cooley Law School in Michigan was unhappy with the US News ranking of law schools, so it developed its own. Under that system, the Thomas Cooley Law School is a top-tier law school. This alternative rating system does not seem to have caught on nationally.

Any ratings system will reward certain activities. To the extent that these activities are something other than what the universities should be doing, it will distort behavior and provide an inaccurate measure. This site has had discussions of how grading students distorts the learning process.

We know that the US News rankings are biased in certain ways. What implies that a measure with a known bias is worse than no measure at all? I can see a problem if the bias is known to administrators but not students, but that seems like the sort of problem that can be overcome.