Opinion: The Unbearable Meaninglessness of College Rankings

(Aug. 31) -- Each year the splash it makes gets smaller, as more students, parents and even college administrators realize the truth about the U.S. News and World Report college rankings: It's largely a beauty contest -- one that bears little relation to the quality of the education kids will actually receive.

Indeed, the president of Williams College, which was named the No. 1 liberal arts college in the country this year by U.S. News, told Bloomberg News that the rankings were "meaningless." That's pretty tough talk, coming from a winner. The second- and third-ranking liberal arts colleges, Amherst and Swarthmore, won't even mention the ranking in their college promotional materials.

Among the larger "national universities" ranked separately by U.S. News, this year's top three are, in order -- big surprise! -- Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Last year's results were so different -- Harvard and Princeton were tied for first.

It's impossible for these ranks to be surprising, because what they really measure is the pre-existing wealth and prestige of these institutions, which perpetuates itself -- attracting the biggest private donations, most government research grants and the most ambitious, highest-scoring students in search of the social and professional validation that comes with graduating from one of America's elite institutions.

Put simply, these schools are on top because they're on top. And young people who want to rise to the top go in search of the places that are already at the top. The kids with the highest scores will be pressured by parents and counselors to enroll in the "best" school they can get into.

But "best" doesn't mean the most rigorous, or the most demanding, or the most coherent education.

The sad fact is that while top universities have been scarred by too many intellectual battles, where Truth fought with Trendiness and lost. At most of these schools, their once-solid core curricula -- the required survey courses in Western civ, American history, English literature, and Greek philosophy intended to give each student a basic, foundational knowledge on which to build -- were demolished in the 1960s and '70s.

These coherent and rich curricula were replaced by Chinese menus of options, which result in a student body where no two undergraduates can be counted on to know any given fact. This makes things harder for professors in upper-level courses, who can't take for granted that their brilliant charges know as much as about American history, Shakespeare's plays, Aristotle or the Bible as their grandparents knew in high school.

Too many top schools are also pervaded by powerful currents of politics, in which teachers (or even more commonly, graduate teaching assistants) use the podium as a soapbox for civic activism.

While speech codes and open suppression of political free expression are withering under the scrutiny of dissident websites and independent campus papers, these problems still persist -- with entire disciplines almost entirely closed to viewpoints outside a narrow political spectrum, much more constricted than the range of opinion outside academia. And yet it is in college that we're meant to explore every viewpoint, to question our own premises; how can we learn to do this from teachers who tread a tightrope of orthodoxy?

I hope more of the best and brightest students will decide to take the risk and seek out schools that focus more tightly on rigorously educating undergraduates in the great books and great ideas; that promote teachers based on teaching rather than research; that insist on keeping the classroom as a place for the open and fearless exploration of truth.

If they make that choice, and turn down the "best" schools for the sake of a better education, they might be sacrificing an immediate career advantage at graduation. But what they'll get in return could be priceless.

John Zmirak is editor of "Choosing the Right College" and CollegeGuide.org.