Evan Goldin | The not-so-exact science of college rankings

I hate college rankings.

No, not the Bowl Championship Series. I'm talking about another college-ranking system, one in which Penn actually outperforms Texas and USC.

I'm talking about the glistening newsstand magazines that proclaim each fall which American university they have deemed the best ivory tower in all the land.

My enmity for the magazine rankings doesn't come from a grudge against Penn's dip from No. 4 to No. 7 - I'd be at this University regardless. It comes from the fact that they're bad for our higher-education system, and they're bad for stressed-out high-school students trying to find the right match.

For many eager high-school students, commercial college guides are the main way they learn about colleges.

Much of the information the guides provide is useful. If I'm applying to a college, I certainly want to know the proportion of students who graduate in four years, the average SAT score and average class size. That's why I bought the guide when I was 17.

It's great to see those stats from different colleges all in one place. It's the ranking of schools on the list that irks me.

By its own admission, U.S. News & World Report says on its Web site that "the college experience consists of a host of intangibles that cannot be reduced to mere numbers."

But that's exactly what the magazines do. Year after year, they have the audacity to declare that Duke is better than Northwestern or that Penn is better than Columbia.

The magazines make the approach look highly scientific, explaining that their rankings are calculated (oh, how exact!) using complicated, intelligent formulas.

And two things are troubling about this.

First, and most obviously, these rankings are incredibly arbitrary. Not only is the formula simply pulled out of thin air, but 25 percent of the formula is composed of a "peer assessment" score. This means that 25 percent of a school's ranking is decided by what vague impressions some educators have about a university.

Comforting.

Second, we're leaving all this to an organization that has no reason to care about educating the public or helping students find colleges. These magazines exist to make a profit, and rankings help them do that.

If it means tweaking the formula year to year to create some movement in the rankings and sell more magazines, you can bet it'll happen.

Luckily, schools and the government are starting to wake up to these problems.

"There are multiple rankings by multiple organizations, all with different methodologies," Wharton spokesman Michael Baltes told the DP in 2004. "Given these factors, each ranking needs to continually differentiate itself."

As a result, Wharton made the best move it could and stopped giving the magazines access to its students' contact information. Wharton, as well as Harvard Business School, realized what these rankings are doing to higher education.

These rankings have helped to create a system where schools are valued on reputation, not performance. And that's great for a small number of schools, like Penn, who find themselves with a windfall of applicants thanks to newfound, partially rankings-driven popularity. But it's not great for students looking for the best education possible, who become hypnotized by these listings.

And more troubling, schools' reputations of late are largely driven by these rankings, and not by real measures of a quality education.

This problem won't solve itself.

But there are new options, as the Commission on the Future of Higher Education declared in its report last year.

The magazines, as much as I would like to vilify them, are filling a void. There's simply not a good source of information on colleges for prospective undergraduates, as my sister learned this weekend when she tried to use the College Board's Web site.

She filled out a long questionnaire. The site told her Eastern Oregon University was her match.

What would truly solve this dilemma is a Web site that collects and presents this data. Instead of ranking the schools in some arbitrary order, each user could create his own formula, ranking the schools on his terms, not those of U.S. News.

If you're looking for a graduate school, you're in luck. Such a service already exists at phds.org, which was started by a bunch of Dartmouth grads. Users rate how important various categories are to them - faculty-student ratio, how often faculty are published, etc. - and the site creates personalized rankings.

In my case, I tried out economics programs. Penn, interestingly, came in at No. 3. And it was on my terms, not some magazine's.

Evan Goldin is a College senior from Palo Alto, Calif. The Gold Standard appears on alternate Tuesdays. His e-mail address is goldin@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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