Editorial | Rankings just a red herring

It was with much ado and media attention that the Annapolis Group announced after a recent meeting that the majority of its members - presidents of well-regarded liberal arts colleges - supported dropping out of the much-read U.S. News & World Report rankings.

The news followed steadily increasing backlash against the rankings; high-ups at Reed and Sarah Lawrence colleges, for example, have had published notable diatribes against the popular list of the country's best higher-ed establishments.

The arguments against U.S. News are varied, but many harp on the supposed arbitrary nature of the rankings. How do you quantify the difference in quality between a Harvard or a Stanford, after all?

But the success and near-canonical nature of the publication among college-headed students and their parents speaks to a much deeper issue in higher education.

With the number of applicants rising at schools nationwide, and with admissions rates subsequently plunging, the difficulty of getting into a prestigious institution has never been more pronounced.

To many, it seems that only impossibly bright students end up in the hallowed halls of Ivy League campuses.

But the pressure to be accepted at a top-notch school remains ever constant, and so suitable alternatives need to be discovered.

And those alternatives - schools that only a decade ago were little-known on a national scale - are able to derive some prestige of their own from rankings like the ones U.S. News provides.

Of course, prestige is something of an absurd concept. Various studies have alleged that it's inner qualities rather than the excellence of a school that really determine success. In other words, the awe one's school inspires in others is much less important than individual agency.

It's also less important than the small, intangible factors that can determine how happy a student it is at any given college - that vague idea of "fit" that college counselors and admissions representatives often refer to. For some students, small schools work best; other students might need a large, urban environment to succeed.

One student's Pomona is another's Penn.

But the concept of prestige still holds so much weight in this country that people think, because of a spot's difference, Duke is a better school for everyone than is Dartmouth.

And until this mindset changes, the problems that U.S. News feeds on will still remain.

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