Harvard and Yale Law Schools Drop Participation in Rankings

[BadWolf]

My two cents as an admin critter whose office is responsible for these types of surveys...(hey, I adjunct too so don't knock me for being totally out of place).

Small schools live and die by these rankings. From the day I started in my position at not-S LAC I despised these surveys. USNews, Princeton Review, College Board, Peterson's, ACT (now defunct), Wintergreen Orchardhouse (now defunct), MFS (this one is the WORST but it's important to the BoT), UCAN (going through revisioning), the list could go on and on. They are onerous, repetitive, and often collect data which could just as easily be sourced from publicly available IPEDS data. Yes, completing the Common Data Set (CDS) does help fill out all these surveys, but it's still a manual process and each publisher has their own quirky questions to be answered.

Honestly, for years the bigger schools could look at the methodologies and creatively craft their responses so the algorithms could take them to the top, because the ranking gurus never fact-checked. Within the past 3-5 years the rankers have actually had to add a spot check to the data with IPEDS, because of so many schools cheating the system...and still they don't realize until whistleblowers alert them to fallacies.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/columbia-usnews-college-ranking/. (Actually, this one I can somewhat understand. Terminal degree is such nebulous term, with no set definition, and with the proliferation of all these wacky doctorates it's understandable there is confusion. Plus, these are generally human resource records, and few people have access to those records.)

People also need to understand the "pay to play", where the smaller schools could pay to be "featured" more prominently on the web pages, even if the rankings were not as good as other similar schools. I know MFS is a huge player in this market, so much so they got into legal trouble. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2017/10/victory-media-settles-ftc-charges-concerning-its-promotion-post-secondary-schools-military-consumers

I'm thankful the parents are getting more educated and starting to see through these rankings. Now if leadership could just be convinced they are not the be-all, end-all. I'm hoping this is the start of the end of rankings all together.

[Ruralguy]

My impression is that parents don't tend to care about rankings once they know their child is unlikely to get into , roughly speaking, the top 50-75 schools.
I have the feeling that most  schools below 75 could just not participate and get the same classes they've been getting.

[artalot]

My uni fell out of the top 100 several years ago and saw a drastic decrease in international student enrollment. So, the rankings really matter to some people, people that many US unis have been milking for full tuition. I think this is why many places will be unwilling to drop out of them - most US students tend to stay relatively close to home, so rankings matter less. However, if you're trying to get students who will pay a premium, you need the rankings.

[apl68]

My uni fell out of the top 100 several years ago and saw a drastic decrease in international student enrollment. So, the rankings really matter to some people, people that many US unis have been milking for full tuition. I think this is why many places will be unwilling to drop out of them - most US students tend to stay relatively close to home, so rankings matter less. However, if you're trying to get students who will pay a premium, you need the rankings.

Okay, that would explain a lot.  Many schools have sought to cash in on international students in recent years, and people looking to come to the U.S. for higher ed for the sake of cachet will presumably find widely-recognized school rankings a big deal to help them see how much cachet they're getting.  I can readily see international students with a U.S. college education trumpeting their college's ranking every chance they get back home.

Ruralguy is surely right that most American parents aren't that worried about rankings.  They go to whatever is the most affordable or has the best word of mouth in their region.

[Wahoo Redux]

My uni fell out of the top 100 several years ago and saw a drastic decrease in international student enrollment. So, the rankings really matter to some people, people that many US unis have been milking for full tuition. I think this is why many places will be unwilling to drop out of them - most US students tend to stay relatively close to home, so rankings matter less. However, if you're trying to get students who will pay a premium, you need the rankings.

Okay, that would explain a lot.  Many schools have sought to cash in on international students in recent years, and people looking to come to the U.S. for higher ed for the sake of cachet will presumably find widely-recognized school rankings a big deal to help them see how much cachet they're getting.  I can readily see international students with a U.S. college education trumpeting their college's ranking every chance they get back home.

Ruralguy is surely right that most American parents aren't that worried about rankings.  They go to whatever is the most affordable or has the best word of mouth in their region.

Both our former school and current school are way down on the list of regional schools.  Almost all of our American students were and are from within a hour's drive at both these places, and neither place attracted top local students.

Our former R2/Div3 school relied on a small contingent of Chinese exchange grad students from one of the least prestigious Chinese universities and, surprisingly enough, graduate students studying dairy science from places like the Netherlands (this school was deep rural).  COVID took a chunk of these students. 

Our current R2/Div 1-AA school has somehow managed to attract a small contingent of Nigerian students who, so far, everyone is in love with because they seem to be such cool people.  Neither school has generally attracted students from wealthy or prestigious campuses or European countries.  The SLAC where I did a VAP was flush with very polite students from Saudi Arabia and places like Pakistan.  Not all of them were fluent in English.

What strikes me is that schools which are low down on the pecking order can recruit students from places not normally considered prime hunting grounds.  So far our current school has not recruited enough students from overseas to stop is downward slide.

[Ruralguy]

We actually stopped bringing in very many international students about 10 years ago. They really had to be 100% paid for, and we couldn't afford it any longer for as many students as we were accepting. We do though bring in some American students with foreign born parents or who themselves weren't born in US but went to school at a boarding school in US. In any case, we weren't brining in very many students from the rankings sensitive crowd, though when enrollment is small, perhaps every pool you can draw from is worth it, so long as on average you can still collect the same amount or more dollars as from anybody else.

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: At Harvard-Yale conference on law school rankings, the education secretary joins the call for all colleges to stop participating.

[Hibush]

For law school coverage, I enjoy reading the folks at Above the Law. They have an article on the latest Princeton Review ranking. I can't tell whether the article is actually mocking the whole ratings business by featuring a ranking led by UDC.

[dismalist]

What you want in ratings or rankings is a measure of value added of the school, not of the selection of students admitted.

Of course the English major graduating from Harvard is going to do well compared to the Business major from Median State U! But if you measure outcomes, you measure the effect of the sum of the ability of students selected and the quality of the university.

Getting a value added measure is hard to pull off for undergraduate education. It's a tad easier for professional schools where people have worked before re-studying.

For B-Schools, compare salaries before and after school across schools, and bingo! [Harvard B-School does produce value added, by the way, it just ain't that much. :-)]

For Law Schools it has been suggested to compare LSAT grades with Bar exam passage rates across schools [and States, for the difficulty of the Bar exams differs].

I've always thought that extant published rankings are junk, but they clearly appeal to people who want to buy lottery tickets they think they can win. The Education Secretary denouncing all measurement of quality is government sponsored harassment. Instead, he could support better measures.

All this is  anti-competitive, too. Lousy published rankings at least can be understood. Their replacement with rumor and innuendo will be harder to understand and verify.