<p>I’m not a fan of the UNSWR rankings, but I understand their appeal. Of course, the weighting of their factors, and which factors they use, is a matter of judgment, and of course the factors being weighted include some very subjective ones and lots that effectively double-count the same things. The arbitrariness of the rankings was amply demonstrated this year by the University of Chicago itself, which had a double-digit jump based solely on how it resolved ambiguities in the information rubric, and which would probably jump another couple of places if it attracted 2,000 more applications from kids with little interest in actually attending.</p>
<p>So. The rankings are not perfect, definitive, or authoritative.</p>
<p>But.</p>
<p>They are a good-faith attempt to do an assessment based on pretty widely-shared, mainstream values. USNWR does not have an obvious, idiosyncratic axe to grind (vs. Newsweek’s high school rankings). It would be hard to argue that any of the factors it looks at is irrelevant to consumers or illegitimate as an evaluation factor, and it is interesting to see how the institutions stack up against one another that way. There is also real value in inducing the institutions to look at how their own metrics compare with other institutions’. And, while there’s not a whole lot of news value in reporting that Harvard and Princeton look really good, the rankings have done a great job of getting people to focus on some lesser known, more regional universities that, on many objective criteria, don’t look a whole lot worse.</p>
<p>Reputations do change, and not even so slowly. I’m not certain that in 1960 Stanford was so distinguishable from USC – pretty strong, ambitious, but second-tier and fundamentally regional. Twenty years later, it was clearly one of the great universities of the world, and twenty years after that it could make a legitimate case to be the greatest. That’s essentially the career-span of a few of the professors I knew there (and, perhaps more relevantly, the career span of David Packer). Places like Northwestern, NYU, and Washington University in St. Louis are in the middle of a clear upward curve. And, sadly, as the Antioch College example shows, things can go the other way as well. But that’s the kind of “creative destruction” that gives vitality to our unplanned, basically market-oriented system, and it has worked pretty darn well in the past century.</p>
<p>(I disagree with some of pmyen’s assessments of the past, however, although with the caveat that I don’t know exactly when s/he’s talking about. When I was looking at colleges in the early mid-70s, there was no question about the primacy of the HYP triumvirate. Dartmouth was right behind – somewhere a reasonable person might prefer to any of the prior three – and the rest of the Ivies were seen as another half-step down, and not necessarily superior to a number of similar places like Hopkins, Stanford, or Chicago, not to mention Michigan, Berkeley, or Virginia. The top LACs were quite prestigious, but the notion of a kid who considered himself fundamentally an intellectual going to Williams would have been laughable. Wesleyan or Swarthmore were a different story.)</p>