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Obsession with Lists

The Washington Monthly has long been a critc of the US News and World Report college rankings. Finally, they've come up with an alternative.

The idea of ranking schools based upon "what [they] are doing for the country," is an interesting one... and not just because my alma mater ranks as the number one liberal arts college. In the Monthly's own words:
Imagine, then, what would happen if thousands of schools were suddenly motivated to try to boost their scores on The Washington Monthly College Rankings. They'd start enrolling greater numbers of low-income students and putting great effort into ensuring that these students graduate. They'd encourage more of their students to join the Peace Corps or the military. They'd intensify their focus on producing more Ph.D. graduates in science and engineering. And as a result, we all would benefit from a wealthier, freer, more vibrant, and democratic country.
I think the business of coming up with more meaningful rankings than those of US News is laudable... it's been widely rumored that those rankings are causing schools to game their admissions procedures and focus energy on manipulating statistics that are only of tangental relevance to receiving a good education. For the uber-geek, check out last year's NBER report, A Revealed Preference Ranking for U.S. Colleges and Unviersities. Their rankings pit institutions in "head to head" competitions, surveying students about which colleges they get into and which they ultimately choose. The authors argue that this system both more objectively measures the quality of an instituion's student body and would be harder for schools to rig:
Our method produces a ranking that would be difficult for a college to manipulate. In contrast, it is easy to manipulate the matriculation rate and the admission rate, which are the common measures of preference that receive substantial weight in highly publicized college rating systems. If our ranking were used in place of these measures, the pressure on colleges to practice strategic admissions would be relieved.
This one's also interesting in that it doesn't rank Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges separately.

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