Stop enabling arbitrary college rankings

Last month, U.S. News & World Report announced it would adjust the way it ranks law schools after multiple institutions — including all five University of California law schools — announced their intention to boycott the rankings system over concerns about the process the media company uses to determine its rankings.

But the company’s rapid response, just weeks after the first law schools announced their decision, only affirmed criticism that the factors that go into the rankings are fairly arbitrary — as are the weights assigned to each one.

Now it’s California’s public colleges and universities turn to follow suit and withdraw participation.

As the most influential college ranking system, the U.S. News & World Report rankings directly impact many students and their families’ decision on where to apply. The problem with that, however, is the same problem with the company’s other rankings: the system is a poor measure of the quality of a student’s overall academic experience.

As Colin Driver, the former president of Reed College, which notably withdrew from the rankings in 1995, writes in his compelling book “Breaking Ranks”: “It takes real chutzpah to claim that a formula, composed of arbitrarily chosen

factors and weights that keep changing from year to year, can produce a single all-purpose measure of institutional quality.”

Take “peer assessment” surveys for example. As part of its ranking process, U.S. News & World Report asks presidents, provosts and deans of admissions to rank colleges other than their own. These assessment surveys yield as many as 20 points on the 100point scale the company uses to determine its rankings. But there is no way these administrators could possibly have an in-depth knowledge of more than a handful of the hundreds of colleges they are asked to evaluate.

Another major weakness of the rankings is that U.S. News ignores altogether the role of community colleges in the rankings of four-year institutions, even though some 80,000 students transfer to both UC and CSU campuses from the state’s community colleges every year. The rankings aren’t able to distinguish between how well a community college prepares these students for success, and how much is attributable to the four-year college to which they transfer.

The ranking system is especially problematic for California because it tends to favor campuses that have substantial endowments and enroll students from more affluent families. That focus immediately puts California’s public universities and colleges at a disadvantage in light of their extraordinary commitment to enrolling low-income and first-generation college students.

“Let’s confer prestige on colleges’ breaking cycles of poverty,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said last August. “Let’s raise the profiles of institutions delivering real upward mobility.”

On that measure, all California’s public universities should be receiving top ratings.

In recent years, U.S. News finally began giving colleges some credit for how well they serve low-income students receiving federal Pell Grants. But colleges can only earn a maximum of 5 points on this indicator on the 100-point scale — not enough to offset all the other measures where student income levels, and college resources play a part.

To be sure, weaning California’s public universities off the rankings system may not be easy to do because some of the state’s schools do exceptionally well. For students and alumni at UC Berkeley and UCLA for example, it may be satisfying that their institutions are tied for the top rating of any public university in the nation. But when private universities are included, UCLA and Berkeley’s rankings drop to 20th. Are Princeton and MIT — ranked as #1 and #2 — really that much better than their West Coast public university peers? Maybe yes — or maybe no.

But the real problem is for other colleges not in the top tier among “national universities.” Take UC Santa Cruz, ranked 83rd, and UC Riverside coming in at 89th — or the 234th-rated San Francisco State. It is hard to imagine parents boasting that their child attends the 234th best university in the country — even though S.F. State is one of CSU’s finest institutions.

Students shouldn’t be made to feel they are attending an inferior college just because it has a lower ranking determined by a media company. Lower-ranked colleges may be a better option for some students for any number of reasons — like their proximity to where students live, their overall costs, the flexibility they offer in terms of class schedules, or how much attention they give to undergraduates.

The truth is that much of a student’s college experience has to do with what works for individual students — such as the drive a student brings to class, the extent to which they sign up for a course of study that really excites them and the social and emotional supports on campus.

California’s public universities have already pushed back on questionable admission metrics by abolishing the SAT and ACT as a requirement for admission. While it won’t be easy, they now have the opportunity to lead the nation by breaking their addiction to the U.S. News rankings, and other similar profit-making enterprises that assign a single number of dubious value to measure a college’s worth. By so doing, they can affirm their commitment to education access and equity for all of California’s students.