Based Columbia Math Prof BTFOs Uni rankings
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>An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html
I've never seen anything like this. Columbia Math prof. Michael Thaddeus, Professor of Mathematics, drops a bomb on institutional rankings, focusing on his own school, and alleges fraud and eviscerates the whole enterprise of rankings.
Takes from the paper's conclusion:
>No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable.
>Students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges, but rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, and what universities offer is far too complex to be projected to a single parameter. These observations may partly reflect the view that the goal of education should be self-discovery and self-fashioning as much as vocational training.
>Perhaps even worse than the influence of the ranking on students is its influence on universities themselves. Almost any numerical standard, no matter how closely related to academic merit, becomes a malignant force as soon as universities know that it is the standard. A proxy for merit, rather than merit itself, becomes the goal.
>When U.S. News emphasized selectivity, the elite universities were drawn into a selectivity arms race and drove their acceptance rates down to absurdly low levels. Now it emphasizes graduation rates instead, and it is not hard to foresee that these same universities will graduate more and more students whose records do not warrant it, just to keep graduation rates high. For the same reason, they will reject applicants who seem erratic, no matter how brilliant, in favor of those who are reliable, no matter how dull.
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html
I've never seen anything like this. Columbia Math prof. Michael Thaddeus, Professor of Mathematics, drops a bomb on institutional rankings, focusing on his own school, and alleges fraud and eviscerates the whole enterprise of rankings.
Takes from the paper's conclusion:
>No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable.
>Students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges, but rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, and what universities offer is far too complex to be projected to a single parameter. These observations may partly reflect the view that the goal of education should be self-discovery and self-fashioning as much as vocational training.
>Perhaps even worse than the influence of the ranking on students is its influence on universities themselves. Almost any numerical standard, no matter how closely related to academic merit, becomes a malignant force as soon as universities know that it is the standard. A proxy for merit, rather than merit itself, becomes the goal.
>When U.S. News emphasized selectivity, the elite universities were drawn into a selectivity arms race and drove their acceptance rates down to absurdly low levels. Now it emphasizes graduation rates instead, and it is not hard to foresee that these same universities will graduate more and more students whose records do not warrant it, just to keep graduation rates high. For the same reason, they will reject applicants who seem erratic, no matter how brilliant, in favor of those who are reliable, no matter how dull.
