Ranting about Ranking!

A friend Rajesh Haldipur sent a link to me about a Times article on Ranking

an excerpt from this article

"This year, some educators in the United States began to question the impact of rankings on the college admissions process, due in part to the March 11, 2007 Washington Post article ‘The Cost of Bucking College Rankings’ by Dr Michele Tolela Myers, former president of Sarah Lawrence College. He quoted director of data research at U.S. News as saying, “In the absence of real data, they will make up a number,” in the same article. In higher education, college and university rankings are listings of universities and liberal arts colleges in an order determined by any combination of factors. Rankings can be based on subjectively perceived “quality,” on some combination of empirical statistics, or on surveys of educators, scholars, students, prospective students, or others. Rankings are often consulted by prospective students and their parents in the university and college admissions process. In addition to rankings of institutions, there are also rankings of specific academic programmes, departments, and schools. Rankings are conducted by magazines and newspapers and in some instances by academic practitioners. For instance, for ranking of law programmes, see Law School Rankings. Rankings may vary significantly from country to country. A Cornell University study found that the rankings in the United States significantly affected colleges’ applications and admissions.[citation needed] In the United Kingdom, several newspapers publish league tables which rank universities. Critics of ranking methodologies maintain that any published rankings should be viewed with caution for the following reasons: Rankings limit the population size to a small number of MBA programmes and ignore the majority of schools, many with excellent offerings. The ranking methods may be subject to biases and statistically flawed methodologies (especially for methods relying on subjective interviews of hiring managers). The same list of well-known schools appears in each ranking with some variation in ranks, so a school ranked as number one in one list may be number three in another list. Rankings tend to concentrate on the school itself, but some schools offer MBA programmes of different qualities (e.g. a school may use highly reputable faculty to teach a daytime programme, and use adjunct faculty in its evening programme). A high rank in a national publication tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some critics object even to publications who now offer lists ranked different ways: by salary, GMAT score of students, selectivity, and so forth. They contend that while this practice is useful, these rankings still are not tailored to individual needs, and their value is diminished if they use an incomplete population of schools, fail to distinguish between the different MBA programme types offered by each school, or rely on subjective interviews."

There has been mounting criticism about Ranking and Rating of business school despite also the increasing popularity of such services by the media. In India itself since 1999 when the first ranking of 50 schools was made by late Prof Dharni Sinha in Business Today followed by the largest ever such ranking and rating done in the media in the year 2000 by Business India, there has been as many as eight such offering at the national level and at least a dozen more at regional and state levels.

The Rankings are usually for 50 schools to a 100 schools and Business India for instance uses 20 ranks and the rest of the schools are rated.

Rankings andratings may be controverial but at the moment they serve the primary purpose of providing information about schools more than classifying them into respective categories. The reader/user of today namely the students andthe corporate have their own yardstick andalso sources of information and they may not easily be swayed by such rankings by media.In fact ironically, it is the same ranking which is riled is the basic source for both thecompanies and students to form their opinion. Increasingly blatant hypes about schools and their ranking to a much higher category than they actualled belonged is easily caught out by the users which only leads to the undermining of thecredibility of the media which publishes such rankings.

Clearly policing the ranking is best left to the reader of the media except that one should demand that the media uses its reach to provide more information and bring greater transparency in publishing data and information about the schools and not sing paens and praises of a few leaving out the rest or worse still selectively jack up the ranking of some schools leaving out the rest in the lurch. This would call for responsibility and a lot of hardword and committment on the part of media.