Like other media-created reputation scorecards, U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings are coming under increasing attack for being arbitrary and misleading.
After years of complaints, 12 college presidents have sent a letter to hundreds of liberal arts colleges urging them to not fill out the magazine’s "offensive" survey of institutional reputations. This is the largest single factor of the overall rankings, accounting for 25 percent of a school’s score.
"Reputation can be another word for gossip," said Washington State’s Trinity University president Patricia McGuire, who pointed out that she like everyone else being surveyed has no personal knowledge or experience with all of the colleges she is asked to rank. "This is not a survey that has integrity based on objective data. We are saying that we will not engage in slandering each other’s institutions or inflating each other."
It’s hard to say if this boycott will get real momentum. Even many of the schools that protest the magazine’s motives and methods still promote their ranking in recruiting advertising and materials.
What is certain, however, is that information-age transparency is making legitimate disputes about the validity and correctness of these media rankings far more visible to the public.
Even the venerable Fortune Magazine has similar smoldering credibility issues. Researchers found that over the last 23 years, the stocks of companies whose scores put them in the bottom half of Fortune’s big-selling "most admired companies" list performed better than the highest-scoring companies. And a blog that the magazine created for its "best companies to work for" issue generated plenty of detailed criticisms against several of the highest-ranking employers.
Like the U.S. News & World Report college index, Fortune’s rankings are also based largely on the opinions of people who may be biased, uninformed or both. It’s this flawed approach that is forcing the transformation of what used to be a slam-dunk annual marketing promotion into an ongoing controversy over a news magazine’s relevance.
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Inside Higher Ed | Battle Lines on ‘U.S. News’
Scatterbox | Corporate reputation rankings are better at selling magazines than proving shareholder value.
Scatterbox | Social media gives unhappy employees a public voice to criticize Fortune’s best companies list.
