Zuckerman's Famous Scam



(image via gonzaga.edu)

Does anyone really take the arbitrary US news & World Report college rankings seriously? Journalist Peter Sacks finally debunks what might be the most ambitious of Mort Zuckerman's profitable scams, namely the US news & World Report College Rankings (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment). Their arithmetic algorithms for their ranking of tiers have always struck as naught else but simple shit. From HuffPo:

"The recent disclosure by a college president that U.S. News & World Report is willing to publish made-up data about a college that dares not play the silly rankings game suggests just how far the magazine is willing to act like Tony Soprano to protect its lucrative franchise. And I'm not talking about the teddy bear Tony who likes his midnight ice cream splurges in his underwear and bathrobe.

I'm talking about kick the marked man until he bleeds and leave him to rot in the New Jersey wastelands Tony Soprano.

Like the sweet Tony, U.S. News & World Report has been known as that nice middle-of-the-road magazine that your grandmother likes and the one students and their parents look to for reliable information about everything from hospitals to colleges, universities and graduate schools. In fact, as the nation's lowest ranking news magazine -- after Time and Newsweek -- U.S. News has endeavored mightily to maintain readership by ranking everything in sight. And none of its franchises in the "America's Best" ranking business comes close to the popularity of its annual college guide.

"In fact, while U.S. News appears to crunch all manner of numbers, from graduation rates to student/faculty ratios, in order to derive its rankings, there is just one factor that drives virtually the whole ranking scheme, and that is the SAT or ACT scores of an institution's entering freshman.

"... All of which makes the story of Sarah Lawrence College so astonishing. A couple of years ago, the private liberal arts college decided to drop the SAT requirement, concluding that the entrance exam wasn't a very good predictor of success at Sarah Lawrence, and that the SAT testing culture simply did not mesh well with the institution's undergraduate emphasis on writing and, well, thinking. Because the college no longer required the exam, it stopped sending the scores to U.S. News. But, as college president Michele Tolela Myers revealed in a Sunday Washington Post op-ed piece, lacking the actual SAT data, U.S. News simply made up some numbers, arbitrarily assigning an SAT average of one standard deviation below Sarah Lawrence's peer institutions, the equivalent of about 200 SAT points."

The full post here. (HuffingtonPost)