This is a book by a well known and respected sociologist (and one of her colleagues) providing a look at the effects of journalistic rankings on higher education in the US. The focus is on the rankings provided by US News and World Report. The academic area whose rankings are focused upon are US Law Schools. To anyone even remotely familiar with the rankings of higher education and professional programs, I am not giving away much by saying that the overall verdict of the study is a negative one - specifically that the USN rankings do not provide students with valuable information but that schools need to pay attention to the rankings to maintain their budgets and attract the students they wish to maintain their reputations. The overall result is that the ratings are not objective and neutral but instead affect the programs that are rated, causing them to change in ways directed at ratings success. The result of these changes is all in all negative in that attention is directed to program aspects that are measured in the ratings and away from activities and results that are not measured. Unfortunately, much of what has been traditionally valued in legal education ends up less visible in the ratings and thus becomes less worthy of attention and resources. Legal education is harmed as this occurs. This last conclusion appears to be one widely held among law school educators and administrators. Espeland and Sauder strongly suggest that the results she identifies for law schools are relevant for higher educational institutions more generally and for other prominent professional schools, such as business schools.
The study is very capably done and I generally agree with the results and conclusions. So why only three stars? Well the study and its results are not surprising and I suspect that the results were thoroughly predictable to anyone whose has spent much time in areas where these ratings are important. Administrators, whose jobs depend on ratings outcomes, will try to game the system. Professors, whose status and pay will flower in a highly rating institution, will go along, as will students, who choose schools and search for high paying high status jobs with the ratings in mind. None of the study results is surprising or new, even though the authors present the results and dire implications as if the novelty was compelling. We have known about the intended consequences of poorly designed and lazily implemented measurement in education and the workplace for a long time. This study draws out similar conclusions for an extreme example. The study is also over written for an academic study. The description is a bit thick and does not help much.
I think I kept reading this because it is an interesting and paradoxical problem. From the peak of baby boomer demand for higher education in the 1970s, coupled with strong cost pressures on institutions of higher education (sometimes called “the cost disease” by Baumol) higher education and professional programs have had to adopt a consumerist approach to attracting students and tuition. Let the customers learn about the products being offered and choose the highest quality products. The problem is that there is an extreme asymmetry of information at work here and it is difficult to this about how students could ever get enough knowledge and wisdom to make an optimal rational choice. If they could, why would they need to attend the college apart from credentialling requirements?
To address this information asymmetry, ratings gained popularity as attempts to reduce unbelievably complex choices down to slick and slim one or two page fact sheets all summed up with a few overall ratings and a general ranking relative to peer institutions. Yes, go with the magazine publishers seeking to sell more issues and increase their revenues as a way to figure out where one will drop hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple years of one’s young life, while sacrificing multiple years of potential earnings. ...but how did the journalists figure out the answers when nobody else could? The paradox of ratings and reputation listings is that they are the most valuable to those who know the least about what is being rated. The more one knows, the less useful or valuable are the ratings - except to the publishers I suppose. This is one of the few consistent results of research on ratings, rankings, and reputation from a wide range of researchers.
Espeland’s study is valuable for documenting the mechanisms by which the intended and unintended consequences of adjusting to ratings occurs. It is not clear at all what can be done about the issues that she documents or how the study results can lead to better choices of law schools by applicants.