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"As a Princeton professor, I really ought to love college rankings. The most famous of them, by\u00A0U.S. News and World Report, currently places my employer first among national universities, nudging out Harvard and Yale.\u00A0Forbes\u2019s list of\u00A0\u201CAmerica\u2019s Top Colleges\u201D\u00A0has us at a respectable third. While\u00A0Money\u2019s brand-new \u201CBest Colleges\u201D\u00A0ranking takes us down a notch to fourth, it still puts us ahead of the other Ivies. Go, Tigers!\nIn fact, as with most of my colleagues, what was once mild amusement at this Game of Lists is fast turning into serious annoyance. Far too many Boards of Trustees fixate on their school\u2019s rankings, and a college president whose school drops sharply in the\u00A0U.S. News\u00A0list now has about as much job security as a Big Ten football coach after a third consecutive losing season. As a result, far too many schools design their policies explicitly with\u00A0U.S. News\u00A0in mind. Among the most nefarious consequences has been the shift of precious financial aid dollars away from students with real financial need, toward affluent ones who can boost a school\u2019s average SAT and \u201Cyield\u201D (the percentage of admitted students who actually matriculate). Stephen Burd filed an\u00A0excellent report\u00A0on this trend last year in\u00A0The Washington Monthly, but it is all too obvious to anyone who, like me, has teenage children at an affluent high school (I know several families with \u201Cone-percent\u201D level annual incomes whose offspring receive substantial merit scholarships).\nIs the problem simply the way the rankings are designed? If this were so, in one respect the\u00A0Money\u00A0list might offer a welcome corrective. Unlike\u00A0U.S. News, which\u00A0gives the most weight\u00A0to academic reputation and student retention rates,\u00A0Money\u00A0takes \u201Caffordability\u201D as one of\u00A0three equal factors, and within this category places significant emphasis on debt.\u00A0Money\u00A0will grade down colleges that\u00A0offer merit scholarships to the affluent\u00A0while skimping on aid to needy students, forcing them to take out higher loans.\nUnfortunately,\u00A0Money\u00A0cancels out this move by using something called \u201Coutcomes\u201D as another principal factor. It will be no surprise what a magazine called\u00A0Money\u00A0means by \u201Coutcomes.\u201D Relying on data from a website called\u00A0PayScale, it measures colleges against each other according to self-reported salaries, using a complex formula that makes allowances for different stages of careers, and for family background and test scores. It also takes area of study into account, comparing science and engineering graduates to each other, not to humanities majors. Thanks to the emphasis on \u201Coutcomes,\u201D\u00A0Money\u2019s\u00A0gold medal this year went not to one of the usual suspects, but to Babson College, which offers only one degree: a B.S. in business.\nGiven the increasingly vertiginous expense of a college education, families of course need to take financial prospects into account when deciding on a college. Despite continuing predictions that\u00A0online courses will do to colleges what file sharing did to the music industry, employers still show little sign of favoring consumers of MOOCs over the recipients of traditional diplomas. But obviously there is a big difference between asking whether a college education will lead to a reasonable standard of living, and judging the quality of that education in large part by graduates' salaries.\nOne can only imagine the perverse effects, if the\u00A0Money\u00A0rankings ever acquire the cachet of\u00A0U.S. News\u2019s. \u201CCongratulations on your grades in your Environmental Engineering courses,\u201D I can hear a career counselor saying, conscious that her own job may depend on helping her school in the rankings. \u201CAnd it\u2019s commendable that you want to go work for Greenpeace. But maybe you should get to know the field a bit, first. Here\u2019s an opening at a fracking company\u2026\u201D\nEven by its own criteria, the\u00A0Money\u00A0rankings may not provide a very reliable guide for prospective college students. Imagine a high school senior whose sole goal in life is to make as much money as possible. He gets admitted to both Princeton and Babson College. Where should he go?\u00A0Money\u00A0would point him toward the magazine\u2019s top-ranked school, Babson. An actual student in this position, however, would almost certainly choose Princeton, and for perfectly sound reasons. According to PayScale, Babson and Princeton graduates have comparable incomes (actually, I\u2019m dubious \u2014 PayScale doesn't track interest income, and experts have\u00A0raised other questions about its figures). But Babson graduates, almost by definition, go into business careers, while a surprising number of Princeton graduates are not interested in high-paying business jobs. Even among economics majors, many Princetonians go on to positions in the public sector and NGO\u2019s, to low-paying jobs with foundations and advocacy groups, and to academia. And while I don\u2019t have the statistics to prove it, everything I know suggests that the Princeton graduates who do care principally about making money very often make very, very large amounts of money, and most likely out-earn the Babsonians by a significant margin.\nThis little exercise points to a limitation that the numerous critics of college rankings systems have pointed out\u00A0again and again.\u00A0Colleges are not monoliths that can be reliably judged by the sort of aggregate data the rankings systems employ. They have strengths and weaknesses, which make any given college the right choice for certain students, and the wrong one for others. Interested in neuroscience? My former employer, Johns Hopkins, offers a terrific undergraduate major. But if Dostoyevsky is your thing, you may want to look elsewhere, since Johns Hopkins has no Slavic Literature department, and sends its students to take courses in the subject eight miles down the road at Goucher College. Matters like these far outweigh the negligible statistical distinctions between a #12 and a #13 in the\u00A0U.S. News\u00A0rankings. Given the huge variations within and between colleges, in everything from academic expertise to financial aid, living conditions, placement records and so forth, by far the best single college ranking system is one that cannot be found on any website. It is a knowledgeable college counselor, who helps students draw up tailored lists based on their own particular interests, tastes and goals.\nAs\u00A0Money\u2019s entry into the fray demonstrates, college list-mania seems entirely impervious to such common-sense observations. Every year, thanks to ever-skyrocketing tuition costs and ever-sharpening competition for admission to elite colleges, anxiety levels among parents and students alike ratchet up a notch. Rankings systems play to these anxieties, and, in the end, do more harm than good. And, of course, they are self-fulfilling prophecies. Expect Babson College rise in future\u00A0U.S. News\u00A0rankings, for no reason other than its success in the\u00A0Money\u00A0rankings, which will drive up applications and therefore increase Babson\u2019s selectivity.\nEven the Obama administration is planning to get into the rankings game. Eleven months ago, the president\u00A0charged the Secretary of Education\u00A0with developing a national college ratings system that would push colleges to \u201Cdeliver better value for students and their families.\u201D The system he described sounds dangerously close to\u00A0Money\u2019s, even if it will draw on more reliable data. It will put a significant emphasis on debt levels, but it will also include \u201Chow well ... graduates do in the workforce,\u201D in order to \u201Chelp parents and students figure out how much value a college truly offers.\u201D Barack Obama might do well to remember that by almost any quantifiable measure, his career as a community organizer would have detracted from the \u201Cvalue\u201D of his own alma mater.\nIn the end, the people who can do the most to help parents and students do not work for the Department of Education or for publications like\u00A0U.S. News\u00A0and\u00A0Money. They are boards of trustees, and their public-sector equivalents, who need to stop appraising their own institutions according to how well they stack up in ranking systems that measure the value of a college education so imperfectly. They need to decide for themselves what this value consists of, and to hire administrators and faculties who can deliver it in the best \u2014 and most affordable \u2014 manner."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/31/arbitrary-college-rankings/>