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Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do about It
Some colleges will do anything to improve their national ranking. That can be bad for their students―and for higher education.
Since U.S. News & World Report first published a college ranking in 1983, the rankings industry has become a self-appointed judge, declaring winners and losers among America's colleges and universities. In this revealing account, Colin Diver shows how popular rankings have induced college applicants to focus solely on pedigree and prestige, while tempting educators to sacrifice academic integrity for short-term competitive advantage. By forcing colleges into standardized "best-college" hierarchies, he argues, rankings have threatened the institutional diversity, intellectual rigor, and social mobility that is the genius of American higher education.
As a former university administrator who refused to play the game, Diver leads his readers on an engaging journey through the mysteries of college rankings, admissions, financial aid, spending policies, and academic practices. He explains how most dominant college rankings perpetuate views of higher education as a purely consumer good susceptible to unidimensional measures of brand value and prestige. Many rankings, he asserts, also undermine the moral authority of higher education by encouraging various forms of distorted behavior, misrepresentation, and outright cheating by ranked institutions. The recent Varsity Blues admissions scandal, for example, happened in part because affluent parents wanted to get their children into elite schools by any means necessary.
Explaining what is most useful and important in evaluating colleges, Diver offers both college applicants and educators a guide to pursuing their highest academic goals, freed from the siren song of the "best-college" illusion. Ultimately, he reveals how to break ranks with a rankings industry that misleads its consumers, undermines academic values, and perpetuates social inequality.
Since U.S. News & World Report first published a college ranking in 1983, the rankings industry has become a self-appointed judge, declaring winners and losers among America's colleges and universities. In this revealing account, Colin Diver shows how popular rankings have induced college applicants to focus solely on pedigree and prestige, while tempting educators to sacrifice academic integrity for short-term competitive advantage. By forcing colleges into standardized "best-college" hierarchies, he argues, rankings have threatened the institutional diversity, intellectual rigor, and social mobility that is the genius of American higher education.
As a former university administrator who refused to play the game, Diver leads his readers on an engaging journey through the mysteries of college rankings, admissions, financial aid, spending policies, and academic practices. He explains how most dominant college rankings perpetuate views of higher education as a purely consumer good susceptible to unidimensional measures of brand value and prestige. Many rankings, he asserts, also undermine the moral authority of higher education by encouraging various forms of distorted behavior, misrepresentation, and outright cheating by ranked institutions. The recent Varsity Blues admissions scandal, for example, happened in part because affluent parents wanted to get their children into elite schools by any means necessary.
Explaining what is most useful and important in evaluating colleges, Diver offers both college applicants and educators a guide to pursuing their highest academic goals, freed from the siren song of the "best-college" illusion. Ultimately, he reveals how to break ranks with a rankings industry that misleads its consumers, undermines academic values, and perpetuates social inequality.
- GenresEducation
368 pages, Hardcover
First published April 12, 2022
9 people are currently reading
135 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 8, 2022
Great book detailing all the inns and it’s of Higher Ed rankings, especially the annual US news rankings. Must read for those in college, thinking of going to college, advising students about college, or working in colleges. Rankings can be useful but when you dig into the methods there’s absolutely no justification for a single list of “best” to “worst” that lumps together all the diverse types of institutions into one list.
December 15, 2022
Suuuuuper redundant, like I get it man
May 12, 2022
This is a really important book for anyone interested in American higher education. Diver delves into the idiocy of the rankings system with such attention to detail it would be hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to even glance at them after reading his book. He also offers a number of alternative ways to look at institutions of higher learning for anyone whose mind is open enough to think iconoclastically.
August 29, 2022
Eye opening to say the least. Since I received a sizeable merit-based scholarship to attend college, I did not enjoy learning of the inherent bias of these awards and the detrimental impact they can have on higher education. There needs to be some sort of incentive/goal for high school students to perform to their best ability. I will definitely challenge those around me who worship these rankings after reading the book.
September 17, 2022
I feel that this should be required reading for any parent with a college-bound student. Peering behind the curtain to understand where rankings come from may just help families make a more informed college choice - one that centers on the student’s interests, abilities, and desired outcomes. All rankings tell us is how impressed your friends will be by the bumper sticker on your car.
September 9, 2022
Colin Diver is the former president of Reed College, and he has written shorter pieces on college ranking in other publications in the past. This is an impressive and worthy book which could be a bible for anyone interested in the subject. I am not optimistic that many parents (and even less, college applicants) will read it, though they would benefit from doing so, but I hope that it becomes widely read by people working in college admissions or college counseling (I have done both). I have to admit that I like just about everything Diver says in this book, and have the feeling that I would have enjoyed working for him when I was in admissions.
The book is a complete catalog of college ranking systems, and there are a whole lot of them, all measuring different things. It was fun seeing his lack of respect for the Gourman Report, which purports to rank the effectiveness of a huge number of academic disciplines at a huge number of colleges. Gourman never explained his methodology, but I did not need to know that. The task was so absurd that the rankings never seemed usable to me. This set of rankings originated in 1983 (the same year as the US News rankings) and is now available only online.
Diver points out that rankings are not science, but rather opinion pieces reflecting what the ranking people have decided is important. If one examines the explanation of how the rankings are calculated, their unreliability becomes clear. There are a lot of variables in a ranking protocols, and they are weighted, but why those variables are the right ones, and how the weight each is given is ascertained has no basis in a scientific sense. Beyond that, the variables in USNews, and probably other ranking systems, change frequently. Is this a repudiation of past results?
As Diver indicates, almost all ranking systems center around ranking schools related to wealth and prestige. There is not yet any usable system related to the quality of undergraduate teaching. In addition, the reader learns how a number of institutions have gamed the system. For instance, class size data is based on fall semester, so move as many large classes as possible into the spring semester. There are a lot of cases of schools simply lying about their data. Indeed, as Driver notes, 91% of admissions heads believe that other schools are not telling the truth. Finally, the USNews ratings depend heavily on a reputation survey administered to senior college officials and asking them to evaluate hundreds of other schools. As someone who received these surveys, I am very aware of how little we know about most other institutions. And the number of administrators participating in the survey has dropped from 60% in 2007 to 20% most recently.
The core of Diver's argument is what he calls the "preposterous best-college claim," and the inanity of ranking as many as a thousand schools in descending order. Schools are as different from each other as restaurants are, and can't be lumped together in a ranking system. The sense of objectivity is an illusion because this kind of precision in ranking is simply not possible.
For families, it would be worth reading the concluding chapter. I was encouraged by what Diver recommends a college prospect should do, and it is what I believe college counselors should also do. Both should read everything they can find -- rankings, college guides, school websites, and anything else about colleges, and work from that to define their personal criteria for what constitutes a good college match. My experience is that most American students start out, like Goldilocks, wanting a medium-size school on either US coast. The Chinese students I have assisted have an even simpler approach: "I want USNews Top 30."
To Diver's credit, this book is surprisingly readable. My only quibble is I would have liked more complete footnoting which would have allowed me to do further research on my own. Bottom line, this is a terrific book on the subject, and my hat's off (with thanks) to Diver for having written it.
The book is a complete catalog of college ranking systems, and there are a whole lot of them, all measuring different things. It was fun seeing his lack of respect for the Gourman Report, which purports to rank the effectiveness of a huge number of academic disciplines at a huge number of colleges. Gourman never explained his methodology, but I did not need to know that. The task was so absurd that the rankings never seemed usable to me. This set of rankings originated in 1983 (the same year as the US News rankings) and is now available only online.
Diver points out that rankings are not science, but rather opinion pieces reflecting what the ranking people have decided is important. If one examines the explanation of how the rankings are calculated, their unreliability becomes clear. There are a lot of variables in a ranking protocols, and they are weighted, but why those variables are the right ones, and how the weight each is given is ascertained has no basis in a scientific sense. Beyond that, the variables in USNews, and probably other ranking systems, change frequently. Is this a repudiation of past results?
As Diver indicates, almost all ranking systems center around ranking schools related to wealth and prestige. There is not yet any usable system related to the quality of undergraduate teaching. In addition, the reader learns how a number of institutions have gamed the system. For instance, class size data is based on fall semester, so move as many large classes as possible into the spring semester. There are a lot of cases of schools simply lying about their data. Indeed, as Driver notes, 91% of admissions heads believe that other schools are not telling the truth. Finally, the USNews ratings depend heavily on a reputation survey administered to senior college officials and asking them to evaluate hundreds of other schools. As someone who received these surveys, I am very aware of how little we know about most other institutions. And the number of administrators participating in the survey has dropped from 60% in 2007 to 20% most recently.
The core of Diver's argument is what he calls the "preposterous best-college claim," and the inanity of ranking as many as a thousand schools in descending order. Schools are as different from each other as restaurants are, and can't be lumped together in a ranking system. The sense of objectivity is an illusion because this kind of precision in ranking is simply not possible.
For families, it would be worth reading the concluding chapter. I was encouraged by what Diver recommends a college prospect should do, and it is what I believe college counselors should also do. Both should read everything they can find -- rankings, college guides, school websites, and anything else about colleges, and work from that to define their personal criteria for what constitutes a good college match. My experience is that most American students start out, like Goldilocks, wanting a medium-size school on either US coast. The Chinese students I have assisted have an even simpler approach: "I want USNews Top 30."
To Diver's credit, this book is surprisingly readable. My only quibble is I would have liked more complete footnoting which would have allowed me to do further research on my own. Bottom line, this is a terrific book on the subject, and my hat's off (with thanks) to Diver for having written it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews