an alternative point of view Rankings do nothing for colleges that are engines of income and social mobility | The Huffington Post
I'm feeling some deja voodoo here. Sniffley Snodgrass, his parents paying full freight at Princeton, won't likely be as concerned with upward mobility as a lesser moneyed student at a less prestigious school.
I've railed against rankings in the past. Anyway, it's a bit self-fulfilling in that elite schools tend to admit the sort of young people who would do well whether they go to such a university or not.
I view college rankings the same as I do rankings of things like the best MLB starting rotation, or March Madness brackets. Fun to look at, debate, and ridicule, but of little real value in the end.
I don't have much confidence in most university rankings, especially rankings of entire universities. Some of them seem to me to have commercial purposes, advertising aimed at attracting foreign students to favored schools. Others seemingly have national biases. Even the more credible and objective ones have a pre-existing idea of what a good university will look like and favor metrics that capture that image. (The US News rankings place inordinate emphasis on class size and seem to favor a 'liberal arts college' undergraduate model.) The only ranking that I have real confidence in is the Philosophical Gourmet Report rankings of philosophy departments. These are subject-specific departmental rankings, broken down by specialties, most applicable at the doctoral-research level, compiled by polling noted philosophers in particular specialties about the strength of faculties at schools other than their own. Even that's subjective and big names that pull up a ranking might not favor an approach or a methodology that I favor. But they also give lists of faculty names as well as the numerical rankings, so I can adjust the rankings in my own head to weight departments more highly that have professors whose work I follow and whose methodology I favor.
Yes, I like the PGR as credible rankings break down once you leave one department. Granted, places like, say, the University of Chicago are good at just about everything, but none of the top unis are equally great in every discipline. The USNWR’s assumptions are highly unrealistic. I wish other disciplines besides philosophy had something similar, but they really don’t. Brian Leiter, the creator of the PGR, has tried hard to make it less about his opinion and more about the consensus of informed experts. Even without this effort, I’d take the subjective opinion of a single expert who knew my own interests over a general ranking by a magazine any day. Leiter’s got an interesting blog. I don’t agree with him politically, but appreciate his resistance to much of the groupthink prevalent in academia today.
