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Paul L. Caron
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Friday, November 25, 2022

Is This The Beginning Of The End Of The U.S. News Rankings Dominance?

Chronicle of Higher Education, Is This the Beginning of the End of the 'U.S. News' Rankings Dominance:

U.S. News LogoLess than one week after the dean of Yale Law School announced she would no longer cooperate with U.S. News & World Report on its annual rankings, several of her peers have followed suit. As of Tuesday, deans at 10 of the 15 top-ranked law schools had said they would stop sending their data to U.S. News.

The collective revolt came quickly — and with barbs. In their announcements, the deans criticized the algorithm that U.S. News analysts use to produce the rankings. “The rankings rely on flawed survey techniques and opaque and arbitrary formulas, lacking the transparency needed to help applicants make truly informed decisions,” wrote Kerry Abrams, dean of Duke Law. The methodology creates “perverse incentives,” wrote Jenny Martinez, Stanford Law School’s dean. ...

If the law deans’ criticism sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes the complaints that have been leveled for decades against an even bigger project: the magazine’s ranking of undergraduate colleges and universities. There, too, critics have said the magazine’s metrics are flawed, opaque, and harm equity efforts.

But seldom have institutions acted on their concerns, as Yale and its peers have recently. And if elite colleges are willing to withdraw their support from one U.S. News ranking in the name of equity, why not another? In other words, is the undergraduate ranking the next venue for this kind of protest?

Not yet. The Chronicle called and emailed the main press offices of all 10 universities whose law deans have quit U.S. News, to ask whether they had considered withdrawing from the main ranking. Four answered. Columbia and Yale Universities’ responses emphasized that their law schools made their decisions independently from the main administration. Michigan had no comment. And Janet Gilmore, a spokeswoman for the University of California at Berkeley, wrote: “We support the decision of the law school and do not, at this time, have plans for the campus to withdraw from the college rankings.” None answered a question asking whether criticisms of the law-school list could apply to the undergraduate rankings as well.

U.S. News coverage:

Boycott

U.S. News Response to Boycott

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2022/11/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-us-news-rankings-dominance.html

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