Why do any of us pay attention to for-profit rankings? Like #PoetsAndQuants? or the #USNews?
They fabricate measures of quality & competition that Presidents tacitly endorse & give nothing back to our communities.
Worse.
They create competition around nonsensical rankings & awards that pay scant attention to the quality of learning or impact on student lives.
Worse.
They create demand for jobs around reporting rankings & awards that take away dollars from fulfilling our core scholarly & teaching missions.
Worse.
They label people great, who we really can’t tell are great, bc greatness hinges on understanding the context in which one teaches & researches.
It’s very different being great at an urban university serving historically disadvantaged communities than being great at an elite university serving advantaged communities.
I could go on.
We need to rethink how we interact with for-profits like Poets & Quants or US News.
They are parasites who commoditize data created by faculty & students, who have contributed to an unhealthy focus on rankings & taken away attention from delivering services to students & other communities that we are called to serve.
Simply put, for-profit rankings detract from our teaching & research & service missions.
What to do?
First, we need a not-for-profit clearinghouse that offers meaningful measures of quality. The measures should be science-based - not based on random surveys or recent graduates.
I write this without irony. That scientists are allowing non-scientific assessments to drive institutional rankings is nonsense.
Second, we need to make apples-to-apples comparisons across universities based on levels of funding, sources of funding, communities served, & impact on those communities.
Absent such context; it is impossible to declare someone better or worse as a faculty member than the person down the street.
I suspect there are far more master teachers at #hbcus who are grossly understaffed & underfunded than at #ivyleague schools who are grossly overstaffed & overfunded.
Third, we need to stop letting predators skim time & rents from academic ecosystems.
Ranking companies should compensate universities for the time & worry they create, rather than letting them extract wealth & divert attention from what matters.
Fourth, absent change, #presidents & #deans should opt-out of rankings.
Why?
Because the #rankings are flawed, they prioritize metrics that benefit wealthy schools with wealthy student bodies, by focusing on indicators such as class size or time to completion, or volume of papers, that have nothing to do with the actual quality of teaching, research, or impact.
It’s time that #universities & #colleges get back to what we are good at, changing the world through offering meaningful educational opportunities & conducting #research that changes the world for the better.
If we get back to basics, we will offer our #students a far brighter future.
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