I'll admit, in all shame, that I think I am to blame for the University of Wisconsin falling out of the Princeton Review's top 20 party school rankings. It was just this summer that I was mindlessly walking down State street when an old man in a yellow nylon jacket that read "Princeton Review" stopped me and asked if I had a minute to spare. Feeling bad about cussing out the WISPIRG representative just a block earlier, I decided to oblige.
The old man pulled out his clipboard and asked "Son, do you party a lot?" I responded by saying "No more than average." He then packed up his clipboard, said "Well, my work is done here," and caught a cab to the airport.
Hence, we have fallen from Everest, and I couldn't be sorrier.
Of course the truth of the matter is that my story is complete bullshit. But the point of my fictionalized encounter is that the wide range of highly-coveted college rankings are a product of nothing more than "junk science," to use the words of our very own chancellor, and they most certainly do not merit the attention they receive.
In addition to UW falling from the ranks of America's top party schools, our university has dropped from 34th to 38th in U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings of the nation's top universities. The same publication has also dropped us from seventh to tied-for-eighth with the University of Illinois and the University of California-San Diego in the rankings of the nation's top public universities.
It should be noted that U.S. News is easily the most respected of the college ranking systems, yet still only serves as an example of faulty science and a self-fulfilling cycle of elitism. When calculating their rankings, twenty-five percent of a university's score is dedicated to peer review and another 5 percent to alumni contributions. That leaves a full 30 percent of their ranking system that falls short of a reasonable analysis of a university’s value to its perspective students.
Furthermore, these rankings artificially dictate the collegiate hierarchy of everything from the happiest students to the best Library and Information Studies graduate programs. They tell us the most beautiful, the most competent and the most drunk. But they don't tell us what we really need to hear: that a decision as important as choosing where to receive our higher education is far too complex to rely on such simplistic rankings.
It has also become ever more apparent that the popularity of college rankings reflects a greater set of societal woes. From No Child Left Behind to the BCS rankings, we have become seduced by the allure of oversimplified and underanalyzed standards of measurement.
Luckily, there are those who understand how confused these rankings are, and our own chancellor is one of them. In a Wisconsin State Journal report, Chancellor John Wiley said "I have very, very deep objections to the whole process of ranking complex things, whether they're universities, hospitals, cities or hamburgers. Because in order to do a ranking that's unambiguous or meaningful, you have to have a single dimension, a single number." Quite frankly, I'm not sure why he commented on hamburgers, but I am comforted by the overall sentiment he expresses.
To think that UW students have so significantly cut their boozing habits to merit a fall from a spot atop the party school rankings only two years earlier, to 21st or worse this year, is ludicrous at best. To think that the standards of performance in our classrooms or our laboratories have empirically lagged in the previous year is a ridiculous notion to entertain. But to think that these college rankings are completely meaningless would be to miss the social commentary they provide, and to miss the societal trend to avoid.
In this year's edition, U.S. News and World Report editor Brian Kelly accurately verbalized the frightening trend his magazine is engendering when he said, "I would like to think that the first reason we're popular is that we have a hard-earned reputation for accuracy."
Not quite, Mr. Kelly. The first, and only reason, that your magazine has achieved its popularity is that people want the real work of researching America's best colleges done for them. We crave simplicity and security as Americans, and we savor the rare opportunity to be told what to do. Unfortunately, Mr. Kelly, your magazine has profited from indolence, not accuracy, and should carry no more clout than an old man in a yellow nylon jacket.
Andy Granias ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and legal studies.
