Reply to If the colleges are all lying about their stats, why does anyone care about rankings?

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[quote=Anonymous]People care about the rankings because they become established wisdom for what is a good school.  People being people, they care less about statistical rigor than about how they measure up.  There's really nothing wrong with that and I'm not against rankings.

But since you asked, you should think a bit more about what makes these rankings so terrible:

First, once you reduce anything to a score, people will manipulate that score to their benefit.  (A classic case of "what gets measured gets done".)  One example from the grad schools rankings:  many law schools hire their recent grads part-time to work in the career office so they'd count in the "graduate employment %" ratings.  Good in some ways, bad in others!  Likewise, do undergrads care about professors' salary or research credentials if the profs never teach?  Are applications, grades and test scores being gamed?

Second, the criteria used are not transparent, so its very unlikely your criteria are the same as USNWR's.   Put it another way, if you said:  "Rank these men from 1-10 on these 5 attributes that i've weighted, and then you marry the one who scores the highest:  looks, brains, personality, wealth and fitness" -- it would be pretty obvious that what the flaws in this approach are.  I might place "looks" higher than "fitness".  You may feel the opposite.  We might rank a man differently who is naturally fit vs. one who works out vs. one who has plastic surgery -- or we might not.  We might value self-made wealth higher than inherited money (or, inherited wealth may be a proxy for "class", so we might leave it in, since we what we really want to do is summer in Block Island.)  We might say it's a trap and you're tricking me into marrying a vain douche by pretending you're being scientific.  None of this is to say it's not important to pick the right partner, or even that "conventional wisdom" isn't important, just that it's dangerous to make a personal decision based on someone else's criteria.

Finally, USNWR is dangerous because it sets the tone for all of American higher education.  They have influence that is wildly out of proportion to the amount of power a 3rd tier regional magazine should have.  Because their rankings are flawed (or, at the very least, not clearly vetted to the public) they are pushing american education in ways that are not good for students or society as a whole. [/quote]

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