Colin Diver has written extensively about what he sees as the wrongheadedness of college rankings. realaxelfoley spoke with him about the rankings’ profound influence on higher learning and why they’re facing a reckoning now
you wrote in November, you pointed out that the rankings have faced decades of criticism from public officials and university presidents, and yet they have remained as influential as ever through all of it. But, you wrote, “something tells me this time is different.” I’m wondering why you think this momentum shift is happening now.
The publication of my book, I think, deserves some of the credit. I know from conversations with some of the law-school deans that they paid attention to it, and they also have paid attention to the example of little Reed College out in Portland. But the point is that you can dismiss Reed College dropping out, but you can’t dismiss Yale Law School dropping out. You can’t dismiss Harvard Medical School dropping out. Yale is widely regarded as the best law school in the country.
Yale Law or Princeton’s reputation will be pristine regardless of what happens, and they’ll get flooded with applications regardless. That also applies to the top-tier schools who have joined them. You could imagine a situation where the A1 group is gone, but the second-tier schools who need the rankings more stay put.
So we gave much less weight to that. Then I saw lots of other things starting to change. Some of our competitors started to reduce the size of their first-year entering class so as to be able to further raise their average LSAT scores and the average college GPAs of their entering students. And they made up for it by increasing the number of transfer students they admitted, and they started to market themselves and started trying to pick off our best students.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. In the book, I quote an article written by Henry Hansmann, a longtime law professor at Yale, who said in print what I understood at that time. Which is that of the people who applied to Harvard and Yale law schools, about half went to Yale and half went to Harvard. And the half that went to Yale went there because it had a reputation for being a very academic institution, a good place to prepare for a career in teaching, for example.
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