THE WORST THING WE READ™: America's most easily ruffled university

INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 157

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt Slips on the U.S. News Rankings

A YEAR AGO, it seemed as if the U.S. News rankings of educational institutions might finally be in trouble. For generations, the rankings had been unshakeable, despite being entirely worthless and almost entirely pernicious. 

Then a shakeup had come: Columbia, U.S. News' designated No. 2 university in the country, got caught faking its data and was dropped to No. 18—embarrassing for Columbia, but even more embarrassing for U.S. News. The premise of the rankings was that there was a real, identifiable ladder of quality in higher education, and U.S. News was simply measuring and recording it. Now it turned out that the system couldn't even tell the difference between the second-best school in the country and the 18th-best. Why would anyone trust it to distinguish between No. 43 and No. 44, or No. 99 and No. 120? What was the point?

Soon after, top law schools, led by No. 1 Yale, announced they would stop participating in the law-school rankings. For the first time, real, collective resistance to the U.S. News system seemed to be gathering. 

And now...it's a new September, and the new U.S. News rankings are out, and schools are fussing over the rankings as rankings again. Like any canny entrenched institution in the early 2020s, U.S. News seems to have decided to deal with its troubles with a quick pivot toward equity and diversity—in this case, tweaking its formula to reward schools for serving poor and first-generation students, while, as the New York Times described it, abandoning "five factors that often favored wealthy colleges and together made up 18 percent of a school's score, including undergraduate class sizes, alumni giving rates, and high school class standing." 

What makes these sorts of maneuvers work is that even the most cynical justice initiative has the power to rouse someone into opposition, on behalf of outright injustice. Yesterday, Vanderbilt University—the new No. 18, formerly No. 13—obligingly stepped up to play the role, issuing a huffy and petulant statement of protest.