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New College Ranker in Town


We rank this one a 5.

There's a new college ranker in town: stateuniversity.com This one purports to be "completely statistical and based on government sources" with the added caveat: "Note that some schools do not have enough data to be ranked, and these schools will not appear in our lists."

Well, it's about time! We're still waiting for U.S. colleges and universities to form a huge consortium for one purpose: self-rankings. But as this new entry into the college rankings arena clearly demonstrates, tomatoes aren't potatoes. In other words, rankings are quite subjective, especially those that purport to be based on statistics since the choice of the set statistics is in itself, an editorial decision.

When this new ranking ranker was rolled out recently, my alma mater, Carleton, wasn't on the list. Therefore, the top ranked college in Minnesota was Macalester coming in the "top 100 tier" at 79. However, somehow Carleton's statistics have now been found, and they are in the "top 20" tier, ranked at 15, thereby BUMPING Macalester to 80. Oh, the drama of this!

I imagine these rankers sitting in a room with dulled pencils, wearing helmets to protect against bumping injuries, drool cups full and overflowing at the prospect of handing out destinies and fates to living institutions on a regular basis.

Built into their algorithms is a leitmotif of a ZONK buzzer for colleges moving down and a POLICE siren for those on the move up.

We all know now what kind of trouble a system can get into if there are too few rankers and raters. We view this new entry as an extremely positive step toward making sure that college ranking and rating isn't left up to one or two entities as it seemed to be heading ... at full speed.

The more rankers out there, the more consumers will realize that rankings are just a set of opinions and not the dressed up statistics [some with helmets!] they purport to be.

-Tim Corwin
Feb. 2009

02/12/2009