Rankled By Rankings? Blame College Presidents for Gaming the System

Rankled By Rankings? Blame College Presidents for Gaming the System

Columbia University misrepresented its data and dropped in U. S. News Best Colleges rankings from No. 2 in 2021 to No. 18 this month. So how did the education students receive at Columbia change? Had it not been for a whistleblower, no one would have known about the cooked numbers. Had it not been for the media firestorm, few people would have noticed. The sound and fury over U. S. News Best Colleges rankings — heard repeatedly in the last few months and over the previous three decades — signifies nothing. Today's hysteria is another needless reaction to a numbers game driven almost entirely by commercial interests. Rankings companies hype findings to boost profits. College presidents hype rankings to boost applications. The biggest losers are students and parents who don't realize colleges have been misrepresenting data for decades. "The broader lesson everyone should keep in mind is that U. S. News has shown its operations are so shoddy that both of them are meaningless," the Columbia whistleblower, math professor Michael Thaddeus, told the New York Times recently. "If any institution can decline from No. 2 to No. 18 in a single year, it just discredits the whole ranking operation." Nearly