From the Outbox -- On College Rankings

In order to simultaneously post more and remain lazy -- I make no representation that standards have not fallen -- I'm going to periodically post material drawn from my deep well of emailed ramblings, starting, arbitrarily, with the following:

The U.S. News school rankings seem sort of like a natural monopoly to me, in that despite the absence of anti-competitive practices (as far as I know), it's virtually impossible for a competing ranking system to obtain any market share. The vast majority of students understandably take the rankings into account when deciding where to go to school, and they have been doing so for years -- the rankings aren't perfect, but it's certainly better to take them into account than to ignore them. In order for a competing ranking system to achieve any influence, enough students would have to rely on it instead. But what incentive do most students have to take the risk of relying on rankings that most of their peers will likely ignore and that aren't necessarily any better?

For example, suppose U.S. News ranks School A #5 and School B #10, and a critical competitor ranks School B higher on its own list. Could the competitor succeed? Almost certainly not. To begin with, as flawed as the U.S. News rankings are, they do heavily take into account the factors that most college-bound students care about (average SAT score, GPA, class size, etc.). They do a good job of indicating where the most qualified students go to school. Therefore, a credible competitor couldn't have substantially different rankings, such as one with no Ivy League schools in the top 10. Unlike in, say, the market for portable electronic devices, there's only so much innovating a competitor can do. Furthermore, even if the competitor's methodology seems more credible, there is a real risk that it's no better, especially given the great lengths to which schools go to massage the data they report. Finally, there's the fact that most students consult the U.S. News rankings due to their ubiquity and don't even consider the more obscure competition. Thus, most students who get into both School A and School B will go to School A, meaning that School A will continue to get the better students. A student who thinks that School B may, in fact, be better may nevertheless choose to go to School A to be with his more accomplished peers. The U.S. News rankings are therefore self-perpetuating.

Because of the power of the rankings, and the money at stake, schools have worked hard at gaming the system. Once one school successfully games the system, other schools naturally feel pressured to follow suit (kind of like with grade inflation). Then we end up with what we have now: a system that's almost completely gamed. Indeed, it would be better if every school gamed the system in the same way, because then no school would be ahead by virtue of its better gamesmanship. For example, if every school equivalently inflated its employment statistics by creating jobs for its unemployed graduates, no school would have an unfair advantage. Obviously, this isn't the case: some schools have moved way up the rankings due to dishonest practices. The other obvious tragedy is that certain data in the rankings simply can't be trusted.

In sum, we have a classic example of a system that's bad but that everyone understandably relies on anyway. The only potential solution seems to be government intervention of some sort, which of course may be more trouble than it's worth. At least, as this article mentions, there are organizations committed to the public service of exposing these serious frauds.