Rankings and the Real World: Incentivizing a Fictional University

BY TALIA SCHAFFER, SETH KAHN, RACHEL SAGNER BUURMA, AND CAROLYN BETENSKY

Over the past few weeks, a slew of law schools have announced that they will no longer participate in the US News and World Report’s rankings because of the publication’s problematic methodology and the effects of their rankings. This spate of denunciations follows on the heels of Columbia University’s decision in July to refrain from participating in the US News and World Report’s ranking process, prompting USNWR to remove the university from their 2022 list, a situation that reveals some of the deep problems with USNWR’s system.

None of these developments came as any surprise to us.  Our organization, Tenure for the Common Good, is one of the many that have been tracking problems with USNWR’s rankings for years. When an institution’s standing depends on self-reported numbers, the temptation to massage those numbers is overwhelming – data falsification plagues the rankings, as such schools as Emory, USC, Berkeley, and Temple have found. Worse, however, is the fact that one rises in the rankings by admitting wealthy students, as Malcolm Gladwell has recently shown and as students and statisticians at Reed College have proved. From our point of view, however, an even worse aspect of these rankings is that they measure a university that no longer exists.

The USNWR rankings imagine a higher education landscape full of stable, well-paid faculty. That is no longer the case. By some estimates as much as 70% of the current professoriate in the United States is contingent faculty  – people hired into the “flexible” positions that higher education management prefers.  In practice, unfortunately, that “flexibility” means semester-by-semester contracts that deny faculty any kind of stability; workloads that change frequently and often at the last minute; the need to cobble together work at multiple institutions; and in the vast majority of institutions, denial of basic resources and exclusion from the protections that sustain quality teaching and research. All of that is true even of the positions that aren’t exploitatively poorly-paid, which most are–averaging $3,000-$5,000 per course section nationally, and often providing no health insurance or other benefits. In short, even the best paid of these positions is professionally untenable, while average positions are barely survivable.

In 2017, Tenure for the Common Good posted an open letter calling on USNWR to revise their ranking system in order to register the massive shift in faculty population. The avalanche of signatures to the letter drew national attention and convinced the USNWR research team to meet with us. We explained to them the reality of work in higher education today: that many universities maintain a skeleton crew of leftover permanent faculty, with underpaid “temporary” workers doing two-thirds of the labor of teaching. The fact that contingent workers are often superb teachers and outstanding scholars only makes the irony more bitter; they have comparable credentials, motivation, and talents to their tenure-track colleagues, but they are paid starvation wages and live in acute precarity.

Yale Law School Dean Heather K. Gerken points out, rightly, that the US News rankings ultimately harm less-privileged students and those who intend to work for the common good: “U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed — they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession.” Yet it important to acknowledge that the same rankings that cement structural inequities among students also work to whitewash the broad inequities in the ranks of their instructors.

As Michael Thaddeus revealed in February 2022, Columbia may have falsified much of the information it supplied to US News.  The recent opposition to rankings from elite law schools reflects a different concern for their impact on the integrity of higher education.  In the end, however, we would suggest that real universities, even elite universities, cannot currently hope to embody the fictitious academia projected by USNWR, for the simple reason that USNWR measures a university that does not exist.

Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Seth Kahn is Professor of English at West Chester University. Rachel Sagner Buurma is Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Carolyn Betensky is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island.  Together, the authors comprise the Executive Committee of Tenure for the Common Good.

2 thoughts on “Rankings and the Real World: Incentivizing a Fictional University

  1. Is less than a dozen “a slew”? Columbia dropped out because of its Spring 2022 scandal when one of its math professors exposed its own dishonesty. Columbia admitted this.

    Every–every–few years we do through this, and US News and World Reports university self-promotion and grifting remains triumphant. Even Univ of Chicago Law School announces that it will remain. And notice how many elite univs. do not join thie own law school.

    Do your homework, please. Compare the different major rankings especially Washington Monthly which uses only govt data not universities data sent directly to US News and Times Higher Education

    Tenure for who’s common good? Can you say? Has tenure, as we have known it for a century, had its day and does it require restructuring like our universities themselves?

  2. Profs Schaffer et al. make a number of excellent points in their essay, but I wonder if they should distinguish some of the issues presented by the USNWR rankings of undergraduate programs from issues in the rankings of professional schools and graduate programs. They rightly point out, for example, that the hypothetical university of the USNWR rankings has a stable faculty population, while the reality is that many colleges, especially community colleges, rely increasingly on contingent faculty for basic teaching services. But professional schools, especially law schools and medical schools, have always used large numbers of part-time, adjunct faculty for teaching and training. The University of Chicago law school, for example, lists over 120 “lecturers” on its website, who presumably teach intermittently, have no tenure, and in many cases do not get paid at all, and accept a faculty title in lieu of monetary reward. The one exception that I noted is a law school librarian…. The same has always been the case for medical schools.

    As a law school grad and faculty member myself, who also teaches undergraduate social science students, I expect law school applicants to have done their due diligence, and to know what are the T14 schools, what are the good schools for social justice programs, the best schools for corporate law aspirations, etc. and an applicant who is unable to do a little digging on the interwebs is probably not an applicant who is going to shine as a law student or as an attorney. Consequently, I have always considered the USNWR law school rankings to have little value, not because they are inaccurate, but because they are irrelevant to all but university administrators looking for a marketing line in their promotional literature, or to be able to claim that their law school rose from number 45 to number 42.

    That said, the scandal at Columbia revealed a different, if related issue that went well beyond the USNWR rankings: for some time it was popularly assumed that law school grads are routinely employed as attorneys, when faculty have long suspected that such success is probably only available to the top graduates of a handful of law schools, and increasingly, law school grads cannot find stable jobs in the profession.

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