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An Inability to Audit
Celebrities are right to be concerned — in many cases there is no particularly good reason why they are famous. The reason why we have the “a-list” is to allow us to make some sense of who is important and why that matters. Becker’s Art Worlds, supposes that ranking systems provide us with some leverage to make decisions with scarce resources, which in capital intensive creative industries is quite a problem. Education is similar to other experience and post-experience goods as we are not especially good at knowing the difference between quality levels but are very willing to put very intense numerical measures on it. Despite the fact that audits are literally impossible, we need the numbers.
The Rankings Are Not Great
A Former Dean at Temple University has been charged with systematically submitted false information to US News and World Report causing their program to appear to be the best of the best. It gets better, in the context of law school rankings, USNR had to make last second changes because they data were embarrassingly wrong. Even something as small as open hours of a library could substantially effect the rankings, which makes little sense. Data quality is only established by the schools themselves.
The buckets of categories used in the rankings these days aren’t super great. The biggest factors are: peer reputation (20), 6 year graduation…
