In 2022, Columbia University math professor Michael Thaddeus published a 21-page analysis accusing his own university of submitting flawed data to U.S. News & World Report. His findings would cause the entire academic world to question the legitimacy of college rankings. For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What triggered Columbia University's rise in rankings?
In 2022, Columbia University celebrated its most competitive admission cycle to date. Over 40,000 students applied for undergraduate spots and fewer than 6% made the cut. The reason for this unprecedented surge might've had something to do with the school's most recent accolade.
US News and World Report had just named Columbia the second best university in the country, right behind Princeton and tied with Harvard. But just as Columbia's new freshman class settled into campus, a shocking revelation surfaced. Their university admitted that it had cheated its way to the top. I'm Margo Gray.
This week on Campus Files, we explore the extraordinary measures that universities will take to climb the college rankings. Think about the last time you bought something. A vacuum cleaner, a mattress, maybe a water bottle. Chances are you did a little research, sifted through brands, and tried to find the best option out there.
Chapter 2: Who is Colin Diver and what are his views on college rankings?
Well, I suppose we are a competitive society, and we are very much a consumerist society, and many of us are status seekers. So all of those things contribute to this preoccupation with rankings that you see almost everywhere in our society.
This is Colin Diver, author of Breaking Ranks, How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do About It. He also served as the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and as president of Reed College.
We want to know whether we're buying good products, whether we're going to vacation in good places, and of course, whether we are sending our kids to good schools.
Few investments feel as significant as choosing a college. It's a decision with long-term consequences, one that shapes careers, friendships, and future opportunities. With so much at stake, it's only natural to want to make the best possible choice. But with thousands of universities to consider, the decision is anything but easy.
going back to the beginning of the 20th century, from time to time, people thought, gee, there ought to be a ranking of schools. So they would come up with something and they would do it for a year or two, and then they would abandon it. But none of them were anywhere near like the systematic ongoing annual rankings that started with the US News rankings.
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Chapter 3: How did U.S. News & World Report start its college rankings?
In 1983, US News and World Report stepped in to fill the void, releasing its first ever ranking of the best colleges. The methodology was rudimentary, to say the least. The magazine sent a survey to university presidents, asking them to name up to 10 schools they believed offered the best undergraduate education. U.S.
News then tallied the votes and published the results, declaring Stanford the best national university and Amherst the best national liberal arts college.
You might say, well, that was pretty unscientific and pretty subjective. But a lot of schools suddenly took these very seriously. My own college, Amherst College, ordered something like 25,000 copies of the US News ranking, which said that they were number one among liberal arts colleges, and sent them out to all the students who were thinking of applying to Amherst.
The rankings quickly became a lifeline for the struggling US News and World Report magazine. When schools like Amherst boasted about their top spot, it turned into free advertising for US News. And the editors realized they could attract even more attention by making their methodology seem more sophisticated. They began sending out lengthy questionnaires to colleges
asking for a range of statistics, things like graduation rates and the average SAT scores of enrolled students.
But the interesting thing was that in those days, colleges were not being required to report as many statistics to the government as they are now. So it was quite a big imposition on the schools to fill out these questionnaires every year. But in spite of that, these colleges all did fill it out and submitted them to U.S. News. So that is another indication that they took them very seriously.
Based on all these different statistics, U.S. News then had to create a formula to measure the quality of an institution.
First, they had to decide which of these variables to use in their formula. But then they had to come up with weights to assign to these different factors so that they could combine them all into a single metric.
In other words, US News had to decide which factors define the quality of an institution and how much each of those factors should matter. For example, if a school has a top tier engineering department, but a subpar humanities program, or has a massive endowment, but limited campus space, how should all of that be weighed?
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Chapter 4: Why do universities change policies based on rankings?
So was US News up to the Herculean task? Well, in 1997, the magazine hired an outside consultancy to review its ranking methodology, and the feedback wasn't exactly glowing. The consultancy concluded, the principal weakness of the current approach is that the weights used to combine the various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible, empirical, or theoretical basis.
In simpler terms, the magazine's supposedly scientific formula was largely arbitrary. But that didn't stop US News. Instead, that same year, the magazine blasted out its rankings online for the first time.
That was a big event because it expanded from the tens of thousands to the millions, the number of people that looked at their rankings. It also, of course, reached an international audience, which was very important because a lot of foreign students want to attend American universities.
With each year, the rankings reached larger and larger audiences, shaping opinions not just across the US, but across the world. And the rankings proved to have real-world consequences. Studies have shown that a school's ranking can directly impact application numbers, yield rates, and even the average standardized test scores of incoming students.
So university administrators, whatever their personal feelings on the rankings, have a strong incentive to climb the list.
When I was the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I felt as though I was a captive to the rankings. Everybody in legal education was complying with U.S. News' rankings, paying slavish attention to them.
Penn Law didn't just pay attention to the rankings. They adapted their admissions process in a deliberate attempt to improve their standing.
US News was ranking law schools, and still is, by giving a fairly heavy weight to the average LSAT score of the incoming students. And we used to use that factor, of course, but we didn't give it as much weight. We tried to factor in less quantitative, more qualitative measures. And we found that because we were doing that, it affected our rankings.
So I confessed, and I confessed in the book, that we ended up changing the relative weights we gave to the various factors in admission for that reason.
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Chapter 5: What discrepancies did Michael Thaddeus find in Columbia's data?
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In 2021, Columbia University had big news to celebrate. For the past decade, US News and World Report had ranked the university at number four or number five. But this year, Columbia climbed to the coveted number two spot out of nearly 400 national universities.
The university's dean of undergraduate admissions enthusiastically wrote on the university website, Columbia is proud of all the factors that led U.S. News & World Report to see us as one of the best universities in the world. We have been working on every level to support our students and are proud to be recognized for this.
The fact that they were number two raised, if not alarm bells, at least it raised my eyebrows.
This is Michael Thaddeus. He's been a math professor at Columbia since 1998.
That was actually the first teaching position that I ever had. I've never taught a course at any other university besides Columbia.
If Thaddeus knows two things very well, it's Columbia University and numbers. And the number two ranking wasn't sitting right with him.
Two meant that we were tied with Harvard and MIT, that we were surpassed only by Princeton in this ranking. And I knew that we at Columbia have certain objective disadvantages compared to those other schools. We have a smaller endowment. We have far less physical space, for example. So even though my admiration for Columbia is boundless, I think this is a wonderful institution.
I've chosen to be here my entire career. I knew that we faced certain inherent disadvantages when it came to a linear ranking.
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