College Rankings
Kevin Carey has a very insightful criticism of the US News and World Report College Rankings:
That translates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you’re a selective college), its ranking would go up. All of this stems from a deficit of reliable, comparable, institution-level measures of quality. Thus we have this crazy higher education market with no value proposition, one where cost and quality are assumed to be the same thing — and in the sense that high-end higher education is a luxury good that primarily serves to signal your exclusive ability to acquire and pay for it, they are the same thing.
There are a whole host of other issues with the rankings, like the ridiculousness of schools limiting class size to 49, so they can boast a higher percentage of classes with “less than 50″ students, which is part of the ranking. But Carey, Yglesias and many critics of the rankings are missing something. The point of the rankings isn’t to say what school is most appealing to wonks, but rather to prospective college students. Now a big part of that is students and parents who desire to go to a prestigious school, which they believe is determined by the rankings (of course, Duke and Wash U aren’t more prestigious than Brown, but that’s neither here nor there).
But at another level, the rankings, especially the input measures that Yglesias and Carey criticize actually say a lot about the school. As someone who just finished an early application to an undisclosed college and spent a lot of time visiting schools, I can say that those who were clearly spending a lot of money on their students (Emory and Pomona spring to mind) really did seem more appealing. This poses a problem for Carey, because measures like “damn, how awesome is it that we have this sweet, super technologically advanced computer lab designed by students with huge ass bean bag chairs all over it” (Emory) can’t really be included under “educational outcomes.”
