This is a subject I know something about, having once been the editor of US News and having tried, with limited success, to clean up the ranking system.
-It’s a subject I care about, having heard so often from so many people about the distorting effects of trying to move “up” and “down” on these capricious measures. And it’s one I’ve written about regularly at this time of year, for instance in 2021, 2023, and 2024.²
-It’s timely subject, with the annual US News rankings coming out soon.
-And it’s a frontier on which I think there’s hope, based on a different approach to rankings now.
That promising approach is one honed over the past 20 years by The Washington Monthly, the publication on which I began my magazine career in the early 1970s. The magazine has taken an important step forward this year.
Background: How we got here.
I don’t often say, “There’s an article from a small magazine, back in 2001, that explains our whole problem these days.” But I’ll say it in this case.
Back in 2001, in The Washington Monthly, Amy Graham, whom I had worked with at US News, and Nicholas Thompson, whom I met in that era (when he was a college student) and who is now CEO of The Atlantic and author of a forthcoming book, together wrote “Broken Ranks,” a seminal piece that laid out the problem with rankings. The fundamental issue is that rankings mostly measure input, or what the colleges have, rather than output, or what the colleges do. As Graham and Thompson put it: