Internal 'U.S. News' report critical of magazine's ranking system

Few things are as highly anticipated by colleges and universities as the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings. Long a subject of intense scrutiny, the ratings have come under fire recently for the selection process the magazine uses to rank schools. And now, details of a confidential U.S. News internal report critical of the rating system were recently published in The Washington Monthly. The study, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, had several criticisms of the methodology used to select the widely read "America's Best Colleges." Most notably, the report found the lack of a "defensible empirical or theoretical basis [for the ranking criteria]" to be its greatest flaw. This year's rankings are scheduled to be released Friday morning on the U.S. News Web site. In the Washington Monthly article, author Nicholas Thompson suggested reforms to the current process, including the elimination of ordinal rankings and greater efforts to account for the intellectual atmosphere of colleges. U.S. News, however, responded in the article to this suggestion, saying that quantifying such data would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. University spokesman Ken Wildes said he feels that U.S. News is making an adequate effort to improve its ranking system, pointing out that "it's very difficult to compare and even rank places that are... very different." He added that colleges and universities are often overly concerned with their places in the widely disseminated list. Last year, Penn was ranked seventh in the annual report. The Washington Monthly piece also held that colleges are often focused on ways to manipulate their own statistics to better suit the rankings. Wildes emphatically denied any such practices at Penn. Thompson said yesterday that any upheaval in the listings as a result of a revised formula could undermine the rankings' future credibility. "That's why they're not going to [reform]," he said. He said that the current ranking system has always favored the Ivy League. "The rankings were designed to make sure the Ivies stayed at the top and once they found [a system to ensure that they did] they stuck with it," he said. "There isn't any principle... behind the rankings. I think they are intrinsically unfair," Thompson said

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.