Unrank Harvard

Despite recent attempts at reform, the modern college search process is still one of the most opaque and even byzantine ordeals in a young student’s life. Unsurprisingly, many high school students and their parents become confused and frustrated by it—it’s understandable that they are looking for some kind of shortcut to make their choices simpler. If only there were some simple, reliable resource that could accurately determine with absolute certitude which schools are worth applying to, and which aren’t.

Enter U.S. News and World Report’s College Rankings, the magazine’s cash cow. U.S. News has perfectly capitalized on the zeitgeist of today’s hyper-involved parents and their overachieving children, milking every cent from their anxiety. The idea is so powerful that the magazine has started rankings for pretty darn near everything that can be ranked—from hospitals to high schools.

With respect to college rankings at least, which we are best positioned to judge, the rankings do far more harm than good. Any system of shorthand that tries to generalize the individual match between students and colleges—particularly through rankings—will fall flat. The qualities of a college include far more than statistics about retention rates, average SAT scores, and faculty-to-student ratios. The U.S. News ranking in particular encourages bad choices and an unhealthy focus on prestige and elitism. If the list is useful for anything at all, it would only be to pad the egos of those schools that end up high on the list or higher than they expected—not for simplifying the college search for confused high school students.

Harvard should do all it can to contribute to the list’s demise by refusing to participate. Seeing as Harvard’s ego—as well as its brand—is doing just fine, we have almost nothing to lose by not participating. Ending early admissions last year was an admirable and bold move, but it was also one the administration could afford to make, due to Harvard’s high application numbers and worldwide name recognition. Just as that decision sparked a nationwide discussion about early admissions policies that led several universities to institute similar reforms, so too could a repudiation of the U.S. News rankings have a ripple effect throughout the country.

Thankfully, we wouldn’t be alone. A majority of the member schools in the Annapolis Group, a large coalition of liberal arts colleges, decided to opt out of the rankings this summer. And in September, a conference at Yale sponsored by the non-profit group The Education Conservancy led to the “Beyond Ranking” campaign, an effort by college and university leaders to develop a “robust, nuanced, and educationally sound web-based system of information, guidance, and interactive tools—one that puts the educational needs of students center stage and restores educational integrity to college admissions.”

While the available descriptions of the Beyond Ranking campaign leaves some important questions up in the air—qualitative comparisons, for instance, might lose some validity if underwritten by the schools themselves—this effort is worthy of support. Harvard should follow in the footsteps in Princeton and Yale, both of which have announced $30,000 contributions to the project this week.

But Harvard should also do what Princeton and Yale have so far not been willing to do: stop supplying U.S. News and World Report with data. Of course, much of the data used in the rankings is publicly available whether the University likes it or not. But even if Harvard can’t stop its name from appearing on the list, a symbolic boycott could have an enormous impact on the way people think about the rankings.

Yet while U.S. News and World Report certainly doesn’t provide helpful information to College-bound students, neither would Harvard’s decision to boycott the list. Consequently, the most important contribution Harvard could make to the college admissions process is a continued focus on spreading information to as many students, parents, and college counselors as possible. While recruiting trips to underserved regions are a good start, the admissions office should support to counselor training programs and the dissemination of qualitative information about a wide range of colleges. After all, if students don’t have good college counselors to answer important questions about the admissions process, they might just be tempted to pick up a copy of U.S. News’s college rankings.