The word on the street is that university presidents may be thinking of collectively refusing to provide data to US News and World Report used for the famed college rankings.
The Wall Street Journal thinks we should have a larger market of metrics besides the US News and World Report rankings of higher education. They quote my George Mason colleague, Tyler Cowan as being skeptical the supposedly “scientific” rankings tell us anything new.
From Tyler quoted in the linked WSJ piece: “there is really no difference at all between a school ranked 24 and one ranked 36.”
Yesterday I had a related conversation with a director of media relations at a very elite liberal arts college about the notion of brand identity among the top schools in the rankings. If there is no difference between number 1 and number 2, then why do alumni get so bent out of shape by a trend-line headed in the wrong direction. My thought is that the rankings (and hence the institution’s brand identity) are picking up information from the market (the market place of students, the market place of ideas) regarding underlying academic quality. So when things move “south” with the rankings, the assumption is that something real and substantive must be changing. A bit different perspective from Tyler’s.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 