Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College and a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has written the best article that I’ve read on the recent decision by leading law schools to boycott the US News ratings. In an essay entitled “Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis,” he makes a highly convincing argument that with or without the US News rankings, “college reputations are fixed, valuable, and based on almost no hard evidence.”
I regard his argument, that the US News rankings are based on almost no real evidence of quality, as absolutely correct, and I wholehearted agree with his main message: That the rankings simply serve to reinforce the existing structure of institutional wealth and prestige.
Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the US News rankings were reverse engineered to ensure that the “right”…
