The latest US News Fraud on the Public is Here!

The U.S. News law school rankings aren't very good, but they look like rocket science by comparison to their rankings of colleges. Here's the top 50 according to US News. We get off to a plausible enough start with the top three:

1. Harvard University
1. Princeton University
3. Yale University

and then, who is #4 according to US News, better than MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, and Berkeley?

4. University of Pennsylvania

And now we're on the other side of the looking glass. Penn is a very good research university, to be sure, one of the top 15 or so in the nation, on a par, more or less, with UCLA, Wisconsin, Texas, Cornell, etc. But how did it get ranked 4th for undergraduate education? It certainly has a better student-faculty ratio than state research universities like Wisconsin and Texas, but that's not why it's ranked 4th. It's ranked 4th because they cook the numbers, plain and simple (as a former Penn Dean said to me a few years back, "I'd hate to be around if they ever audited the books"). That started with former Penn President Judith Rodin; whether Amy Gutmann will continue that "tradition" remains to be seen. For a variety of reasons having to do with the ranking criteria, the undergraduate rankings are even more subject to manipulation through creative accounting and outright fraud than the law school rankings.

Here now the rest of the top 50 according to US News:

5. Duke University (NC)
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology
Stanford University (CA)
8. California Institute of Technology
9. Columbia University (NY)
Dartmouth College (NH)
11. Northwestern University (IL)
Washington University in St. Louis
13. Brown University (RI)
14. Cornell University (NY)
Johns Hopkins University (MD)
University of Chicago
17. Rice University (TX)
18. University of Notre Dame (IN)
Vanderbilt University (TN)
20. Emory University (GA)
21. University of California – Berkeley *
22. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor *
University of Virginia *
25. Georgetown University (DC)
Univ. of California – Los Angeles *
27. Wake Forest University (NC)
28. Tufts University (MA)
29. U. of North Carolina – Chapel Hill *
30. Univ. of Southern California
31. College of William and Mary (VA)*
32. Brandeis University (MA)
New York University
Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison *
35. Case Western Reserve Univ. (OH)
Univ. of California – San Diego *
37. Boston College
Lehigh University (PA)
U. of Illinois – Urbana - Champaign *
University of Rochester (NY)
41. Georgia Institute of Technology *
42. University of California – Davis *
43. Tulane University (LA)
University of California – Irvine *
45. Univ. of California – Santa Barbara *
46. Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. (NY)
University of Texas – Austin *
University of Washington *
Yeshiva University (NY)
50. Pennsylvania State U. – University Park *
University of Florida

One does wonder what planet one is on when a "news" magazine informs its readers that Texas and Washington are on a par with Rensselaer Polytechnic and Yeshiva; or that Illinois is on a par with BC; or William & Mary is better than NYU. To be sure, the demeaned research universities on this list are big, which counts against the undergraduate experience they provide. Yet they are so dramatically better in terms of faculty quality and research that one really must ask: does their bigness really "drag them down" that far for purposes of undergraduate education? (And how to explain preposterous results like ranking Duke and Penn on a par with, or ahead of, Stanford and MIT and Columbia? Cooking the books and fraud, I fear.)

To be sure, I would send my children to Wash U/St. Louis over Texas and Washington, even though the latter two are significantly stronger research universities overall. But Wash U is very good, and, by all accounts and evidence, offers a much better undergraduate experience (most importantly, smaller classes, and more of them taught by regular faculty). But I'd never send my kids to UVA, Georgetown, Tulane, let alone Yeshiva, over Texas, and not just because of the tuition. The simple fact is that any reader who was influenced by apparently "significant" differences in rankings--like Texas being 46th and UVA being 22nd--would simply end up being defrauded, to the detriment of their children. (As a research university, UVA ranks well below Berkeley and Michigan, as well as every state research university ranked behind it in the US News top 50, except for Penn State, Florida, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine. But it is unusually small for a state university, which is a huge advantage in these rankings because of all the "per capita" measures employed.)

But do not despair, good reader, since as Karl Kraus has told us before: "No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist." And when journalists rank academic institutions, that's exactly what you get.