The Absurdity of U.S. News College Rankings - Per Malcolm Gladwell
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Anonymous
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I heard Malcolm Gladwell explain this on Farid Zakariah’s program today this way:
There are five different variables in U.S. News algorithm, of which the one with the most weight is a given institution’s reputation. To get this, all the college/university Presidents are asked to give their opinion of the reputation of all other institutions on a scale of 1 to 5. What does a college President in one part of the country know about colleges in other parts of the country? But this reputation value contributes the most to a college’s ranking in the results. He said, some smart hackers got into the algorithm and they could correlate a college’s reputation value depends on three factors with a 91.3% correlation. The three factors are the size of a college’s endowment, the annual tutu on fee it charges, and the percent of white students in its student body. In other words, the richer a colleges, the more it serves the rich people (who can afford to pay high tuition fee), and the more it attracts white students, it’s ranking in the U.S. News list will be higher. He said he could talk about the other four variables similarly. No wonder we don’t see much of State Schools and none of HBCUs in the top 40 or 60 national colleges/universities. Same thing goes for many liberal arts colleges where undergraduate education is the focus. |
Anonymous
| I am so tired of Malcolm Gladwell and his sense of expertise in all things. |
Anonymous
| I agree with your post. But, realize liberal arts schools are ranked separately from national Us. |
Anonymous
+1. His pretentiousness is nauseating. |
Anonymous
| He went to Trinity College so he just sounds bitter to me. |
Anonymous
| He may be pretentious, but he’s not wrong. Those rankings are whack. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Trinity College at U Toronto. Agree with rest of your sentence. |
Anonymous
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The other problem with Gladwell is that he's often wrong.
Forty percent of a school's rank comes from its success at retaining and graduating students within 150% of normal time (six years), graduate indebtedness, and social mobility factors. Graduation rates themselves have the highest weight in outcomes and in our rankings because degree completion is necessary to receive the full benefits of undergraduate study from employers and graduate schools. We approach outcomes from angles of graduation and retention (22%), graduation rate performance (8%), social mobility (5%) and, new this year, graduate indebtedness (5%). https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings |
Anonymous
It doesn’t matter what college he went to it would’ve been in Canada and none of them rank in US news and world report therefore they all suck |
Anonymous
| Of course he’s right. It’s insane that anybody doesn’t see it needs Malcolm Gladwell to tell them that |
Anonymous
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He's got a bee in his bonnet about elite colleges.
He did a whole thing about how Bowdoin sucks because their food is better than Vassar's, meaning they spent more on that than financial aid. Without, of course, doing any financial analysis of the procurement and preparation methodologies of the dining services. So he has no idea. Didn't stop him from making the correlative claim. I do find him entertaining, but his BS is no better than any other entertainment that claims complex topics are simply illustrated. |
Anonymous
| Bravo to Malcome to say this. |
Anonymous
| The world rankings are more logical and respected globally. |
Anonymous
This is simply not true. The global rankings are even more nonsensical, and one of them, QS, is notorious for its British bias. |