Why Do We Listen to U.S. News Anyway?

On Sept. 24, Loyola proudly posted their most recent climb in the U.S. News & World Report’s university rankings — to number 81 in value. 

While this ranking cushions our slightly more dismal overall score — tied with Fairfield University, Clark University and the University of Oklahoma for 132, holding the 81 high above our heads lends undeserved rhetorical power to the flawed project of collegiate ranking. 

These rankings are the result of what seems to be a sporadically determined matrix of assessment criteria. Considered factors include ”peer assessment,” “field-weighted citation impact” and “borrower debt,” according to U.S. News.

These factors are weighted from 0 to 100 percent, with the associated weight determining the importance of any given element. “Borrower debt” carries a weight akin to a first week reflection assignment of 5% while “peer assessment” boasts something closer to an unfairly hefty final exam — 20%.

The outsized burden loaded upon the indistinct “peer assessment” is where the system begins to rapidly fall apart. U.S. News uses this as a lump category to figure in anything impossible to represent with hard data. A university’s commitment to certain teaching initiatives or to new investment models might be thrown into this category.

The category also accounts for the unfair incorporation of wishy-washy notions about prestige. This means cultural or historical ideas surrounding Ivy League schools matter more than what these schools actually stand to offer students, heavily influencing the ranking breakdown.

The mystical allure of an Ivy League institution — with its brick and stone facades — might be considered as no more than set design in other evaluations. But the disproportionate 20% of the overall score “peer assessment” accounts for upgrades these unfounded whispers to shouts, statistically muffling arguably more prudent measures of assessment. 

But upon closer inspection, the ranking of various academic institutions amounts to nothing more than “peer assessment.” Harvard is among the best because, well, it’s always been there — why challenge that?

Beyond this, current conceptions of power inordinately determine perceptions of higher education. The Ivy League’s entanglements with power began long ago and have remained largely unaffected by the shifting tides of new understandings in education, intelligence and aptitude. 

Academic institutions have managed to unmoor themselves from the notion standardized tests have legitimate bearing on an individual’s intelligence, acknowledging performance on these exams is largely bound up in access to certain resources. Similar factors impact college acceptance, to any given institution and to higher education itself. 

Yet, these revelations haven’t been applied to our ranking system, despite targeting the same root inequities, the same root causes.

Thus, our current system — one derived from these rankings and the historic lineages and associations of certain institutions to positions of power, wealth and potential for scholarly aptitude — is absolutely meaningless. 

This doesn’t mean we don’t feel it. It infects the air all around us, a buzzing molecular force that has managed to work its way into the most modest of conversations and the subtlest of signifiers. 

Students traverse Loyola in University of Chicago sweatshirts, not because they like the logo more but because the logo seems to imply something deeper about their worth and ability. We talk about where we could’ve gone and what we could’ve been like high school quarterbacks who tore their ACL in the eleventh hour, doomed to never “go pro.” 

We allow that 132 or that 81 to imprint upon us this feeling of profound worthlessness, like all we could ever do here at Loyola — not Northwestern, or UChicago — is languish in our own mediocrity.

So, what do we do? The rank of any one university in the broader scheme of higher education has no real intellectual or moral bearing on a person’s ability to do epistemological work. And yet, it has a very real effect on the way we view each other and ourselves. 

Do we cast it all away and start anew? Break the cold steel of our chains and join our brothers in arms in the fight for a classless state? Can we work within this wound-up realm to create a more concrete, tangible form of university assessment?

So long as we lend rhetorical power to these ranking systems, like the one concocted by U.S. News, we begin to lose sight of the more holistic categories of assessment that might reflect the true value of any given institution.