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College rankings — especially the broad “best” lists based on self-reported data — are more of a bragging right than a reliable resource for prospective students. They’ve evolved into a game where schools play against each other, with prestige being the prize.
Some university administrators even facing prison Attempts to cheat the system to improve their institution’s ranking. People go to great lengths because these lists have measurable positive and negative impacts on schools, especially economically.
Ranking in the top 25 schools alone can lead to 6-10% increase In the application.Instead, the rankings dropped, as Columbia did in U.S. News & World Report 2022-2023 Best National Universities list, may cause the application to drop and cost the school tens of millions of dollars.
Rankings are used in vastly different ways by different stakeholders: as a profitable product for publishers, a powerful marketing tool for schools, and various guides for prospective students and families. This would not be a problem if all stakeholders agreed on the primary purpose of the rankings, which is to provide an overview of the best schools based on a comprehensive list of factors reflecting a range of views and rigorously tested statistical methods.
But this is not the case, and prospective students end up failing because of it. Quantifying concepts like “best” or “most valuable” is extremely challenging when school and student experiences vary widely. One-size-fits-all rankings based on limited data derived from flawed methodologies are not what schools are after, nor are publishers collecting them as resources in the first place, but selling them as a product.Gerhard Casper, former president of Stanford University These shortcomings were discovered in 1996and they still persist.
However, some players, including Yale and Harvard, refused to play. As university rankings face more dramatic reckoning, ED intelligence Explores why university rankings are — and always have been — a controversial practice.
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