US News Now Ranks America's Best.... Pants

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE... "No matter who you are, what you’re doing in your pants, or where you’re doing it, these pants are THE BEST! We’ve ranked all of the pants in the country with your input (even when you have no idea), and used our secret algorithm to rank each and every pair so you can know the exact order of pant excellence regionally and nationally!”

Ok, I made all of that up, but you get my point. Ranking pants makes no sense. In fact, it makes as little sense as ranking colleges and universities. Not because some relative assessment of quality isn’t important, but because these lists are making the wrong relative comparison. How colleges (or pants) compare to each other is not useful. Quantifying each school’s academic, social, and financial fit to each prospective new student, now that would be interesting and useful!

The original US News college rankings were developed in 1983 to sell magazines for a third place brand. Perennially a mile behind Time and Newsweek in readership, US News editors came up with the idea of an annual college ranking issue as an early form of click bait. They insightfully deduced that for their affluent, educated, target audience, stoking the competitive coals of who has the better diploma might get the magazine noticed.

Well, it worked beautifully and has served the magazine’s purpose better than they could have imagined. But for decades now, their rankings have caused schools to contort themselves (and even lie) for ratings. This pernicious list has also reinforced the notion that the optimal approach to selecting a college is to go to the highest ranked school you can get into - "go to the best”.

That’s simply a terrible idea and these rankings have reinforced this flawed point of view for too long. In fact, like much that came out of the 80’s - trickle down economics, consumerism, mullets, etc. - it turns out this wasn’t the most helpful, productive approach. It has contributed to generations of students making bad school choices based more on brand perception and less on individualized social and academic fit reality.

The good news is, we can now buzz the mullet.  Technology and the preferences of Gen Z, and Gen Alpha behind them, give us the opportunity to replace the harmful school-to-school comparison model of the 1980’s with a more helpful, individualized fit model. Modern data science with a splash of AI can now tell students where they are most likely to find academic and social happiness and graduation success, based in their own individual alignment with any's school's proven culture. 

It’s like getting custom tailored pants! And given the costs of higher education these days, doesn’t that sound like a more valuable and productive approach to ranking?