On a world without rank

We Americans are suckers for a good ranking. Perhaps it’s our passion for meritocracy and competition, for always arriving at the “best.” Or perhaps we’re just lazy and enjoy being told what to like.

Maybe the most visible—and controversial—of these lists at the moment is the annual college ranking. Indeed, the past two months have seen Columbia score near the top in several categories. U.S. News and World Report, as we all know, has us at fourth on its list of “Best National Colleges,” while Forbes ranks us 13th. According to the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings, we are 11th on the planet. The people over at Academic Rankings of World Universities gave us eighth on their version of the same list.

In more specific areas, we fare similarly well. The Princeton Review puts us first in “Best College Town” and fifth in “Best Library.” We are also number 12 in schools with “Most Musical Alumni,” according to Spinner. And according to Reform Judaism Magazine, we’re number 10 on the list of “The Top 60 Schools Jews Choose.”

But regardless of how you feel about where we should have been ranked on any of those lists, our obsession with them poses an interesting question: What purpose do these rankings serve in the world in which we live?

Now, that’s a very big question. To narrow it down for the sake of this article, I’m going to refer only to the list published by USNWR. Why? Well, because it’s the most popular and, I think, the most influential.

An article on the organization’s website titled “Why U.S. News Ranks Colleges and Universities” suggests that the rankings are there “to help you make one of the most important decisions of your life.” It goes on to say that “to find the right college, you need a source of reliable and consistent data—information that lets you compare one college with another and find the differences that matter to you.” This is true. The rankings can help high school students determine their chances of getting into a school and find out what schools are academically comparable.

That said, there is no question that applicants give way too much credence to the rankings. How many people do you know who would have had a serious dilemma on their hands had they gotten into Harvard and Columbia, even if they had always wanted to go to school in New York (particularly back when Columbia was number six!)? It seems now as if choosing Harvard in that situation would be foolish, but your 12th-grade self knew there was some reason behind it.

Of course, if there were no rankings, society couldn’t obsess over them, and students would be relieved of the stress of worrying about where their schools were ranked in relation to their friends’ schools. Comparison might become slightly more difficult, but that could be a good thing. The premium online edition of the USNWR rankings ($19.99) already has an excellent comparison feature in which you can select a number of schools and examine side-by-side data on academics, cost, financial aid, student body, etc. If universities were simply listed on the site alphabetically, or geographically, or by size (instead of by rank), and this compare feature were free, we might have a good solution to the problem posed by the lists.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that the rankings aren’t all bad. The rise in prestige and volume of applicants that inevitably follow a rise in rank encourages school administrators to improve their institutions in key areas reflected in the methodology used by USNWR: graduation rate, per-student spending, faculty salaries, class size. The lists are actually a great incentive for colleges to keep getting better.

So what’s the solution? Do we keep them or get rid of them? There seems to be a building anti-rankings sentiment in this country, but it also seems that rankings do serve an important purpose. Ideally, there would be some system that could hold colleges to high standards and incentivize constant improvement without using the flawed ranking system. Students could choose schools based on less arbitrary factors than where an institution fell on a list and perhaps even be happier. But I’m not exactly sure what such a system would look like. So until someone comes up with something better, I guess we’re stuck with the rankings. Which is okay as long as we don’t take them too seriously (and as long as Columbia keeps moving up).

Neil FitzPatrick is a Columbia College junior majoring in creative writing and East Asian languages and cultures. He is a former associate editorial page editor. Excuses and Half-Truths runs alternate Mondays.