Dear global education leader,
The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education released its 2022 college rankings this week. Harvard, Stanford and MIT topped the list, which is as surprising as a gray day in London. The top five were the same as the top five the year before, nine of last year’s top 10 were back, and 19 of last year’s top 20 remain in the top 20.
The week prior, US News and World Report released its rankings. Princeton topped the ranks for national universities, as it has for many years, with all the usual suspects clustered at the top.
My reaction to these rankings is not positive (this is me adopting British understatement). A huge portion of the US News ranking is peer assessment, which is effectively asking one university administrator to rate another university about which he or she likely knows absolutely nothing. (As the head of admissions of a major US university told Malcolm Gladwell on his podcast about this: “I am certain that I am far more qualified to be a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America and vote on the hall of fame than I am to assess other institutions for the US News and World Report.”) “Resources” is a big category, which will naturally bias Harvard with its $42 billion endowment over, say, Ohio Wesleyan with its $236 million endowment. Graduation rates factor in, which might incentivize universities to accept students most likely to graduate — students who are wealthy, and don’t have children or jobs.
Create a ranking and you incentivize gaming of that ranking. This Boston Magazine piece about Northeastern’s president moving the university up 60 spots over a decade also lists many institutions caught manipulating various stats to increase their standing. According to the story, Baylor offered cash incentives to students who retook the SAT to get their scores up, an employee at Clemson said it had manipulated numbers and purposefully rated other organizations poorly to bolster itself; Iona College officials admitted to misrepresenting acceptance rates, SAT scores, graduation rates and alumni donations over a decade, while Emory University said it inflated student grade point averages for four years and SAT scores for a dozen.
As I rooted around in the WSJ/THE methodology, I did find some useful metrics. Student engagement is 20%, an important measure of value. Rather than just salaries post graduation rates — which would incentivize pushing graduates into investment banking over say, public health — it uses a value-add measure to see if colleges help students exceed their predictive job prospects.
But those are the rare bright spots. US News and World Report still relies on its “experts” to rate everyone else. And common sense and evidence also suggest that rank doesn’t translate to student experience or long-term happiness.
In 2018, Challenge Success, a nonprofit that is part of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, published a white paper titled: “A ‘Fit’ Over Rankings: Why College Engagement Matters More than Selectivity”. It found that college selectivity (Stanford’s is ~5%) does not determine how much a student learns, how happy they are, or how much they love their jobs when they leave. What young adults do in university matters more than where they do it.
The researchers found that six experiences matter most to how fulfilled employees feel later, including taking a course with a professor who makes learning exciting and finding a mentor who encourages students to follow personal goals.
I know humans want to compare and contrast as a way to make meaning in the world. I did. As part of my “research” I went down the rankings rabbit hole, checking my college, and playing way too much with the various filters. But I then reminded myself that these are products media companies are hawking. Perhaps those companies mean to offer useful information to assist in what is a maddeningly complicated and overwhelming process, but they are also tools meant to prey on our predictable need to see who’s on top, even if it’s the same few institutions every single year.
Stay curious
Jenny
