A handful of top medical schools, including Stanford and Columbia, pulled out of U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings in January, following a similar exodus of more than a dozen law schools, including UC Berkeley, Yale and Harvard, late last year. It’s a welcome development that is overdue. Undergraduate institutions and other graduate schools should follow this lead.
For too long, colleges and universities have played along with the rankings process that is based on flawed methodology and prizes wealth and reputation over educational quality, even though many education leaders have criticized the fairness and validity of the rankings. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona last year called the ranking system a “joke” because it encourages schools to game the system.
Higher-education institutions would serve students better by pushing for a new system that provides detailed information and data without relying on rankings.
