Review of BREAKING RANKS
The dark side of college rankings
When the news broke of affluent American parents paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their children into our nation’s top colleges, many were furious, others weren’t surprised, and for some it just confirmed the corrupt nature and inherent inequity in the highest echelons of American higher education.
But why are some colleges “better” or “worse” than others? Why are the wealthy competing to get in to only some colleges and not others?
Enter, US News and Report.
Today, we’re used to seeing the US News “Best College” rankings come out annually. The usual suspects top the list – Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, UCLA, Michigan. You know the drill. Like most things today, we want things ranked. What is the best and how much better is it than the next thing? Colleges are no exception. And the US News rankings are king.
The pernicious part comes in when colleges, especially the elite colleges in, say, the top 100 or so in the nation, make decisions that affect real students based on their desire and need to move up the US News rankings, which often is in opposition to their stated mission of educating students. In Breaking Ranks: How The Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What To Do About It, Colin Diver explains the ins and outs of college rankings and the tricks educational leaders play to game the system.
Breaking Ranks is set up four parts beginning with a history of the rankings industry, which began in earnest in 1983 when US News published its first report to save their struggling enterprise. Part 2 explains the association of rank with wealth and spending. Part 3 explains the gatekeeping of elite colleges, namely SAT scores and admissions games. And Part 4 explores other important features of colleges that can be considered for ranks, like job placements, meaning, economic mobility, and the like.
This was a fantastic book. Having been in higher education as a student and professional for over a decade, I still learned a lot about the nitty gritty of rankings. Diver does an excellent job discussing a pretty boring topic with lots of data in an engaging way. But what stands out the most from this book is that college leaders (primarily at elite institutions) prioritize rankings over educating students. What comes out of the PR mouthpiece may actually be a defensible cover for institutions working to boost their US News ranks. Here are some examples.
Test-optional admissions, whereby students have the option of whether to submit their SAT scores for consideration is a way for colleges to boost their rankings. Although PR will tell you test-optional admissions is for ‘equity’ but reducing the number of lower SAT scores submitted (since lower scoring students are less likely to submit and more likely to be from a minority background), the institutional average SAT score is actually higher, which is a positive for rankings.
Institutions will increase the marketing of their institution widely in the name of trying to find deserving students to grace the quad of their institution. By doing so, the institution gets more applications, but still only admits the same size incoming class. This reduces their acceptance rate (the percent of students admitted), which is a positive for rankings.
Alumni relations and legacy admissions are fundamental to elite college rankings. By keeping alumni happy and admitting their affluent children, colleges can grow their endowments and donations, which the college can use to increase the ‘value’ of their campus. And by keeping enrollment low, colleges can now claim to be spending massive sums of money “per student” – which sounds great on paper – but mainly colleges get a boost in rankings.
These are just a few examples of how colleges put ranks first in their decision making. It’s a complex game, and Diver expertly gives you an inside look at how elite colleges play – and are punished by US News if they don’t. Breaking Ranks also brings clarity to the data used by ranking algorithms, how colleges massage that data, and how it’s weighted in ranks. In short, most of the data inputs can be criticized on numerous grounds. The rankings can be useful, but how different are schools ranked 19th and 20th, really?
Should we rank colleges at all then? It’s probably inevitable, but one thing is for sure, a single orderly list from 1 to 739 isn’t useful. The American college landscape is diverse, with various types of institutions serving different populations and needs. A student looking for an immersive classical education is probably better served at St. Johns or Reed rather than UCLA or Princeton. CUNY schools give lower-income and minority students a better return on investment than, say, Michigan. And your local technical college is probably better for specific training than your state flagship university. But the US News “best colleges” list doesn’t show that. And that’s the problem.
Published: April 2022
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education by John Warner (2020)
The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough (2019)
The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (2018)
This post contains affiliate links, allowing me to earn a small commission when you purchase books from the link provided. There is no cost to you, and this will allow me to keep this newsletter free and open to all. Happy reading!