Don’t be fooled by U.S. university rankings

Don’t be fooled by U.S. university rankings. The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News & World Report), which was released at the beginning of this month...

Report's annual national university rankings surprised me. Harvard and Princeton are tied for first place. They are followed by Columbia.

These universities are not bad, but think about it! Can you really say what is "better" about Princeton than Columbia? Technology) How is it better than the California Institute of Technology, which ranks tenth? Technology? And how is No. 28 Tufts better than No. 33 Brandeis?

You certainly can’t. U.S. News likes to claim that it uses a rigorous approach, but, IMHO, this is just a list put together by the magazine’s editors. Even if it doesn’t do any harm, But it will definitely have consequences in the future.

>Magazine editor rankings, because people like to read this kind of content. Two years ago, "U.S. News and World Report" stopped publishing the paper magazine, and compiling rankings not only of colleges, but also of law schools, graduate schools, and even high schools may be what kept this enterprise alive. People. They care so much about the rankings it gives that they are willing to pay $34.95 (approximately 221.75 yuan) to go to the magazine's website to find out the details.

Moreover, they also give these rankings an authority, although this authority is difficult to stand. It is easy for universities to take advantage of these rankings. How much money the school can raise and how much it spends: including on faculty, small classes, and school facilities. It also cares about how selective the school's admissions process is.

Since then, some universities originally served a very different student population than Harvard or Yale, but they are now also pursuing the top students in high schools. These schools know that if they want to get higher rankings, they need to spend crazy amounts of money, even if the result is to make their already overburdened teaching workload even more onerous. "If you figure out a way to provide the same service with less money, your ranking on U.S. News and World Report will drop," said the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. Kevin Lee, director of education policy at the America Foundation Carey said. These rankings encourage trends that are contrary to the development of the country.

In addition, these rankings also exacerbate the anxiety of many high school students about college rankings. Too many middle school students are now pressured by parents, tutors and society itself to get into a "good" school. They are losers. And those who get admitted but don't have the money to go to school often end up with heavy debt that they may not be able to pay back for the rest of their lives. "U.S. News doesn't create this social trend," Carey said. "What it does is describe it very accurately."

As it happens, Carey has also been editing a different college ranking list for The Washington Monthly for the past few years. (I was an editor at Washington Monthly in the late 1970s.) Washington Monthly's college rankings are not a reference for school grade, but rather evaluate schools on some more useful dimensions: social mobility, for example, or "value for money." This year, the top national universities on the list are the University of California, San Diego and Texas A&M University. Neither school ranks among the top 30 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. They made the Washington Monthly list simply because they graduate more students than one would expect given their student population and the cost of education is reasonable.

Yes, the ranking of "Washington Monthly" is just another list compiled by the magazine editor, and it will inevitably have shortcomings. But the magazine wants to emphasize that we should encourage this model of higher education. Can you disagree? I have no doubt that you can get a great education at Texas A&M. Just like at many educational institutions that aren't ranked among the top universities in U.S. News & World Report's rankings, you're sure to get a good education.

Not long ago, I read an article written by a student who had just graduated from Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant, widely regarded as the most prestigious public high school in New York, has just had a cheating scandal. To a large extent, it was students who felt they had to get into a prestigious college that caused the scandal.

The author of the article was not involved in cheating. In her own words, she was admitted to an "ideal university", but her parents could not pay the tuition. Eventually she went to a state school and was very sad. She wrote that whenever someone mentioned college, she would always "prevariably express a vague reluctance to say more and prevaricate." Although, according to her, she had accepted herself into college, at the end of the article she vowed to save a lot of money to ensure that her children would not suffer the same fate.

>How sad. Maybe one day she will understand that where you go to college is far less important than how hard you work in college. Perhaps readers of U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings will one day understand this, too.

>Translation: Zhang Wei, Gu Jinglu