College Rankings as an Information Cascade — Why you should stop paying attention to the US News report
As students at Cornell, I’m sure we have all looked up college rankings at some point or another, maybe some of us despairing as Cornell’s ranking drops from one year to the next as we helplessly watch Harvard and Princeton fight over the top spot. There are so many factors that go into the quality of a school: professors, resources, range of courses, graduation outcomes, post-grad salaries, location, dining hall food, and so on. How is it possible that US News can come out with these “definitive” rankings every year?
In a New Yorker article from 2011, Malcolm Gladwell reveals what is really behind these rankings. Out of the many factors taken into account to produce the final values, the single factor with the most weight is “Academic Reputation,” clocking in at 20% (down from 22.5% when Gladwell’s article was written). How is Academic Reputation evaluated? “Every year, the magazine sends a survey to the country’s university and college presidents, provosts, and admissions deans (along with a sampling of high-school guidance counsellors) asking them to grade all the schools in their category on a scale of one to five. Those at national universities, for example, are asked to rank all two hundred and sixty-one other national universities” Gladwell writes.
Of course, it seems nearly impossible to have enough insight in order to give hundreds of institutions numerical scores, and Gladwell does assert that this system is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I propose that the rankings can also be viewed as an information cascade. The US News rankings had to start somewhere, and indeed they began their surveying in 1983. This first survey was based entirely on peer assessment and simply asked college presidents to name top schools. I am going to assume that when asked this open-ended question (instead of being given a list of schools), the respondents gave answers based more on personal knowledge of the school’s abilities to educate and perform research.
Decades later, however, anyone sent these surveys doesn’t have a truly personal reason for most of their rankings; their opinions have cascaded down from decades, perhaps centuries, of college reputation and wealth. If the president of a university doesn’t know how to rank a school, what better place to look than last year’s rankings? Through the lens of an information cascade, it makes perfect sense why these rankings are fairly stagnant from one year to the next.
Though hard to ignore, college rankings are as unreliable as trying to guess the majority color of marbles in a bag when the only marbles being picked out are Harvard and Princeton.
An aside—I would highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast episode about college rankings from earlier this year https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/lord-of-the-rankings/.
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-order-of-things