What do you think?
Rate this book
Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability
Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In Engines of Anxiety , sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder delve deep into the mechanisms of law school rankings, which have become a top priority within legal education. Based on a wealth of observational data and over 200 in-depth interviews with law students, university deans, and other administrators, they show how the scramble for high rankings has affected the missions and practices of many law schools. Engines of Anxiety tracks how rankings, such as those published annually by the U.S. News & World Report, permeate every aspect of legal education, beginning with the admissions process. The authors find that prospective law students not only rely heavily on such rankings to evaluate school quality, but also internalize rankings as expressions of their own abilities and flaws. For example, they often view rejections from “first-tier” schools as a sign of personal failure. The rankings also affect the decisions of admissions officers, who try to balance admitting diverse classes with preserving the school’s ranking, which is dependent on factors such as the median LSAT score of the entering class. Espeland and Sauder find that law schools face pressure to admit applicants with high test scores over lower-scoring candidates who possess other favorable credentials. Engines of Anxiety also reveals how rankings have influenced law schools’ career service departments. Because graduates’ job placements play a major role in the rankings, many institutions have shifted their career-services resources toward tracking placements, and away from counseling and network-building. In turn, law firms regularly use school rankings to recruit and screen job candidates, perpetuating a cycle in which highly ranked schools enjoy increasing prestige. As a result, the rankings create and reinforce a rigid hierarchy that penalizes lower-tier schools that do not conform to the restrictive standards used in the rankings. The authors show that as law schools compete to improve their rankings, their programs become more homogenized and less accessible to non-traditional students. The ranking system is considered a valuable resource for learning about more than 200 law schools. Yet, Engines of Anxiety shows that the drive to increase a school’s rankings has negative consequences for students, educators, and administrators and has implications for all educational programs that are quantified in similar ways.
240 pages, Paperback
Published May 9, 2016
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Read
December 20, 2021Maybe not as fun as Homo Academicus, but definitely more relatable. (My wife took the LSAT a couple times, got a super high score, then taught LSAT prep classes for Kaplan, went to U of C Law School and got a job in Big Law where she now does lots of interviewing of law students and lateral candidates.) My marginal notes ("UGH", "pathetic!" "mega-yikes") express strong revulsion at the strategies that some law schools use to game their rankings, like hiring their own graduates temporarily to keep employment rates high, soliciting applications from candidates who definitely won't be accepted to keep selectivity high, and transferring funds from need-based scholarships to merit scholarships to attract students with higher LSAT scores to improve their median score. It seemed to me that the easiest way of blocking some of the worst effects of the USN rankings would be to encourage a pluralism of ranking systems, like the one that exists for B-schools that the authors describe in Ch. 7, so that schools can pick and choose which parameters of evaluation are most important to them, and declining on one ranking system isn't the end of the world. Better yet, why doesn't someone develop a slick consumer-facing ranking system that lets people choose what parameters they really care about and spits out a ranking based on those choices?
Shelved as 'abandoned'
January 8, 2023Interesting ideas that are tangentially relevant to university rankings in Australia (or even high schools) but too US-specific. DNF @ 50%
February 25, 2018
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.
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.
October 6, 2022
Engines of Anxiety is a very important book; it is not interesting in the slightest (and I say that as a former law school nerd) but it reveals and explains so much of what is going wrong in modern society.
Notionally about US law school rankings, Engines of Anxiety details the story of what happens when commodification, legibility, efficiency, and optimization are taken to the extreme, leading to an inadequate equilibrium with profound costs to society.
It's disheartening that despite Game Theory being invented almost 80 years ago and understanding exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, nobody in society views it as their responsibility to fix. I appreciate self-interest and the incentives are strong, but there are too many cowards leading important institutions.
I highly recommend this book and think it merits inclusion on lists of essential reading for understanding society. You can skim through this book in a few hours and gleam its most important insights.
Notionally about US law school rankings, Engines of Anxiety details the story of what happens when commodification, legibility, efficiency, and optimization are taken to the extreme, leading to an inadequate equilibrium with profound costs to society.
It's disheartening that despite Game Theory being invented almost 80 years ago and understanding exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, nobody in society views it as their responsibility to fix. I appreciate self-interest and the incentives are strong, but there are too many cowards leading important institutions.
I highly recommend this book and think it merits inclusion on lists of essential reading for understanding society. You can skim through this book in a few hours and gleam its most important insights.
February 14, 2024
比两人2007年的AJS论文更进一步，把ranking/quantification和accountability放在一起看US News上的法学院排名。我可能更喜欢那个reactivity的框架。
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews