Last week, Brown received the dubious honor of being proclaimed "the number one college in the world" by the Best 50 Colleges list, a poorly-formatted, stencil-font website that sprang onto students' radar via Facebook. While we do not believe this is a ranking meant to be taken seriously - though kudos to whoever made it and put Harvard second - its methodology, including points awarded for "public perception," "famous people who attended the school" and "things that actually pertain to students," provides a brilliant satirical slant on the absurdity of the current college ranking systems.
As higher education has become more competitive, so has the struggle to be ranked higher on lists compiled every year by various news outlets including Forbes and USA Today. These rankings pit universities against each other in an attempt to compare them against a flat set of homogenous factors, like tuition, freshman retention rates and "undergraduate academic reputation," according to the New Yorker. Applying the same baseline of judgment to every institution is deeply problematic - a small liberal arts school, for example, is going to have very different numbers and a different holistic approach to education than a large research-based institution. What might be the "best" college for one student might be a terrible experience for another. For that matter, what factors make a university "the best"? The number of accolades awarded to faculty? The number of students employed immediately after graduation? Furthermore, high-ranking status could encourage institutions to falsify numbers they provide to move higher on the list, as occurred with Claremont McKenna College this year.
This is not to say that rankings are entirely devoid of meaning. For many, especially high school students with limited access to resources, the rankings provide a good starting point to find schools that might suit them best. The surfeit of choices available can often be overwhelming, and some kind of stratification can be used to help make order of the hundreds of schools vying for attention from prospective students. However, placing a ubiquitous framework on all the colleges in the country results in a list that is skewed toward a certain set of values: namely, those of the makers of the lists.
None of this would matter quite as much if society didn't imbue these arbitrary rankings with such power. Combine the pride displayed by many students last week at being proclaimed number one by someone with no legitimate authority with the dismay and intense speculation last year when Brown slipped from first to third on the Princeton Review's "Happiest Students" list. Whenever Brown rises or falls a place on any list, it causes a certain amount of concern or jubilation.
The simple fact is that these rankings don't affect someone's individual experience in the slightest. Does knowing that Brown is no longer considered the "happiest" university in the country make someone personally less happy here? While the happiness of students and the pressure to be happy at Brown is certainly a subject that merits discussion, this requires a thoughtful and multifaceted approach rather than looking at a number on a list. Brown's place in the perceived hierarchy of colleges prompts interesting questions about how our educational system and values contrast with other undergraduate models. This is something that cannot be conveyed by statistics, especially within a system that differentiates between the strengths offered by different approaches to education.
We encourage students to look at these rankings from a critical perspective and seriously evaluate why, if, in fact at all, they matter. We may all have a competitive streak, but it should not be allowed to blind us.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
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