College Rankings as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Decided by a Powerful Authority
This New York Times article from earlier this academic year touches on the controversy of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. As Cornell students, we know that our college decisions were likely a major decision for ourselves and our families for many reasons. For one thing, many see it as a stepping stone into the future, but more importantly, it is also a tremendous investment for most families. For this reason, many stakeholders find it helpful to refer to the U.S. News & World Report college rankings to help evaluate their college options. One study cited in this article found that school rankings were the most important factor in selecting an institution for 63% of applicants. However, the accuracy of the famous rankings have been increasingly called into question. According to this article, Walter Kimbrough (interim director of the Black Men’s Research Institute at Morehouse College at the time this article was published) said that “it shouldn’t be called best colleges– call it America’s most privileged colleges.” Questions of falsified data being reported to the ranking agency have also been raised.
For one thing, within the context of the rankings and the college application process as a whole, this article made me think a lot about popularity. We can define popular colleges as ones with enormous numbers of links coming into it. For example, we may imagine that a lot of incoming college students apply to Cornell, so we may consider it to be a popular college. However, the question of “Why?” which could be answered by this NYT article and other concepts from class.
To start, U.S. News & World Report is an authority on college rankings. Not only this, but it is a powerful authority with a high authority score. At the very least, we can infer that being referred to highly by a strong authority works in favor of historically “popular” schools. Technically speaking, we know that hubs linked by authorities with higher scores tend to have good hub scores (and vice versa). So, hubs’ link to their formal rankings by a powerful authority and improve their hub score, while also validating their rank. Assuming some sort of weight is incorporated into this system, a stronger argument could be made on this theory.
More topically, in terms of the concept of popularity itself, one quote particularly stood out to me. For context, Columbia went from the number 2 school to off of the top 10 list entirely (#18), as many Cornell students celebrated earlier this year. Columbia’s fall from grace may have influenced some students’ decisions to apply there (or rather, to not). One parent, in regards to their child’s now uncertain plan to apply Early Decision to Columbia said, “Columbia hasn’t changed. The ranking has changed.” If it wasn’t already clear, this quote speaks to the importance of rankings and their consequences in the real world. We can imagine that these consequences are difficult to prevent and even more difficult to come back from. Tangentially, this made me think of this as the equilibrium concept where if we don’t think enough people want to apply to Cornell (or Columbia, or some other school), we may not apply there at all. If not enough expectation is generated, then the equilibrium converges to stable equilibrium 0.To the point, Cornell (along with other ivy league schools), as mentioned by Kimborugh, have built their reputation based on historical privileges they have been afforded. Now, they reap the cyclic benefits through a formalized ranking system. Since so many students make decisions based on this report, Cornell is a popular choice due to its rankings, even if some may argue that it is not the “best” school. I believe that the U.S. News & World Report rankings are reaffirmed year after year where the most popular schools are able to maintain their hold over their positions at the top of the list, feeding into their popularity and resulting in a self-fulfilling rank.