Why Did the White House Abandon Its College Rankings Plan?

In his weekly address this Saturday, President Obama introduced the revamped College Scorecard website, meant to help prospective university students “identify which schools provide the biggest bang for your buck.” After more than a year of planning, however, the new site’s mountain of data (171 megabytes, all told) is missing its most buzzed-about feature: rankings.

 

Head-to-head rankings, such as those compiled by U.S. News and World Report, which posted the 2015 installment just last week, tend to invite controversy. Critics accuse the magazine of sending parents, high-schoolers, and college deans into a frenzied keeping-up-with-the-Joneses contest each fall, their obsession over debatably superficial numbers leading to real consequences for student learning and debt. 

 

But as most skeptics acknowledge, ratings themselves aren’t the problem; unhelpful metrics are. On most popular lists, the same small club of elite schools jostle with each other, fighting over a one- or two-place difference, yet they serve a minuscule percentage of the country’s college students.