How is the increasing emphasis on ranking colleges affecting college educations?
Although getting into Harvard and similar schools is difficult, most colleges have to work to enroll enough tuition-paying students. This is reassuring for people who are worried about getting into college. However, it leads to competition among colleges with unfortunate results. In recent years, increasing emphasis has been placed on systems for ranking colleges. One of the best-known is America’s Best Colleges, published each year since 1987 by U S News and World Report. This system attempts to do the impossible: to determine which colleges are the “best.” It uses a series of statistics such as the number of students who apply, the percent who are accepted, ACT or SAT scores of entering freshmen, percent of students who graduate, and alumni giving rate. Such factors are used because they can easily be measured, not necessarily because they tell much about a college or what one is likely to learn by attending. College administrators strongly criticize the rankings but almost all see t
