College rankings are pure ‘hype’ (and I work at Penn)

Earlier this month, U.S. News and World Report downgraded Columbia University’s ranking from second in the nation to 18th. I’m a graduate of Columbia, so you might guess that I would be upset by its precipitous decline.

Actually, I’m delighted. The entire episode underscores the absurdity of the U.S. News system, which lowered Columbia’s ranking after a mathematics professor at the school showed that it had misrepresented the average size of its classes. Columbia apologized for that, and also for exaggerating the academic qualifications of some of its professors.

That comes on the heels of the scandal at Temple, where a former dean of its business school was found guilty last year of using fraudulent data to increase its U.S. News ranking. And earlier this year, the University of Southern California removed its education school from the rankings after admitting that it provided inaccurate numbers to the magazine.

The Columbia story lit up the internet with other critiques of U.S. News. Who really cares if 100% of Columbia’s faculty hold the highest degree in their field — as the university originally reported — as opposed to 95%, as the school has now acknowledged? How does that affect the quality of the education that students receive?

These are good questions, but they also divert us from a bigger one: Why are we so obsessed with college rankings in the first place?

“Why are we so obsessed with college rankings?”

I teach at Penn (No. 7), so perhaps I shouldn’t be downplaying the importance of college rankings. But if you have the skill and ambition to get into my school, you could do every bit as well if you choose a less elite one. Don’t fall for our hype.

Many people still believe that a college degree with more prestige — however you measure it — will yield greater benefits in employment, income, and the other traditional markers of American success. And that turns out to not always be the case.

Anyone who thinks otherwise should look at the work of the late Princeton economist Alan Krueger. An influential aide to Barack Obama, who named him chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Krueger is best known for demonstrating that a higher minimum wage doesn’t necessarily lead to job losses. But he also showed that elite universities don’t necessarily give students the economic boost that we imagine.

In a brilliant 1999 paper, Krueger and coauthor Stacy Dale examined students who were admitted to an elite school but chose to attend a less prestigious one. And they found no difference — none — between the life outcomes of those students and those who went to more eminent institutions.

In a 2005 interview with journalist Malcolm Gladwell, Krueger used an example that will be familiar to readers of this newspaper: Penn and Penn State. You won’t be surprised to learn that Penn alums have higher average incomes than Penn State graduates do. But when Krueger compared students who were accepted by both schools, it didn’t matter where they went: The kids choosing Penn State earned the same or more than those who selected Penn. Translation: It was the student that mattered, not the school.

In a 2011 follow-up study, Krueger and Dale found several important exceptions to their rule. For students who are Black, Latino, low-income, or whose parents weren’t college graduates, the differential prestige of an Ivy-type school did matter in future occupations, earnings, and so on. Nobody is quite sure why. But the pattern is clear, suggesting that members of these groups have good reasons to choose more selective colleges.

I once met Krueger at a conference, where I told him that I wished that all of our anxious high school students — and, even more, all of their anxious parents — would read his 1999 paper. A gentle soul with a self-deprecating sense of humor, Krueger laughed. “I can’t even get my family to read it,” he quipped.

Tragically, Alan Krueger died by suicide in 2019. But his work remains as relevant as ever. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault doesn’t lie in U.S. News and World Report or in the flawed ways it assigns stars to our universities. The problem is us, and the way we make the star universities matter much more than they really do.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was published this month in a revised 20th-anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press.