This week, as the U.S. News & World Report college rankings hit newsstands across the nation, administrators at elite colleges will react as they do every year -- with a well-rehearsed display of dismissive disgust. They will call the rankings flawed indicators of a college's academic worth. They will encourage high school seniors not to base their college choices on an arbitrary list. And they will accuse U.S. News of having imposed an artificial competition on colleges desperate to move up even one or two slots in the rankings.
They will be right about all these things -- and dead wrong about the big picture. The U.S. News rankings are no doubt flawed, arbitrary and subjective. As a result, they may well be the most maligned journalistic enterprise in America. But what university administrators and other critics rarely acknowledge is that the rankings are also a crucial bulwark against the creeping overvaluation of college sports at the expense of college academics.
Without the U.S. News rankings, elite colleges would likely be turning over even larger numbers of coveted spots in their undergraduate classes to athletes, imperiling racial and intellectual diversity at the nation's top breeding grounds for future scholars and leaders. And state schools -- accountable to lawmakers and, ultimately, the public -- could find themselves pressured to squander even more money in pursuit of national championships many of them will never even come close to competing for.
To understand why this is the case -- and what it has to do with the U.S. News rankings -- you have to start with the concept of the athletic arms race, masterfully documented in the groundbreaking 2000 book by William Bowen and James Shulman, The Game of Life. Backed by an extraordinarily comprehensive database of statistics on several generations of students at selective schools, Bowen and Shulman argued that colleges are locked in an arms race that is inflicting serious damage on American higher education, but from which individual schools are unable to unilaterally back down.
Though Bowen and Shulman restricted their analysis to selective schools, the broad concept of an athletic arms race is by no means limited to elite institutions. In order to compete for national championships, colleges of all kinds are engaging in practices that are not beneficial to their schools. For one, they are spending too much money on athletics. While some individual teams occasionally make money, athletics as a whole at most schools is a dramatically unprofitable enterprise -- draining money that could be spent on research, devoted to financial aid for low-income students or better distributed among a variety of artistic, intellectual and athletic activities. Moreover, smaller schools are picking fairly high percentages of their applicants with athletics as a crucial criteria for admission -- turning over coveted spots at prestigious schools to students who, on average, according to data assembled by Bowen and Shulman, are disproportionately less likely to take full advantage of the academic, intellectual and leadership opportunities offered by American higher education.
These are to be sure, broad generalizations, and they are not meant to imply that athletics have no place at the American university. Indeed, Bowen and Shulman argue quite strongly -- and as a recent college graduate and sports fan, I agree -- that athletics ought to have a cherished place on college campuses. The question they raise is one of proportion: Are universities overvaluing athletics to the detriment of their primary mission, which is teaching and research? And the answer they suggest is yes.
The reason for this overvaluation is the athletic arms race, and the reason for the arms race is pressure to win. A college may wish it could reduce its student-to-teacher ratio or hire more renowned professors rather than sinking millions of dollars into its football team. But as long as its conference rivals are sinking millions of dollars into their football teams -- attracting the best players with premier facilities, paying the coaches with the biggest reputations -- the school won't have a choice. It could unilaterally disarm, but that means it would never win another football game. Because of the pressure on schools to win, that's almost never an option.
Pressure to win comes from a number of sources -- alumni, donors and, in the case of state schools, lawmakers and taxpayers. But it flows most of all from the unique nature of sports. "Part of the reason that sports is so alluring as a field for competition," Bowen and Shulman wrote two years ago, "is that it is so results-driven and so quantifiable. Everyone knows (or can find out) who won the Rose Bowl, which women's basketball team is the national champion, and which Division III college was the swimming champion at its level. It is much harder to avoid endless arguments as to whether this program of study is superior to that one (although in recent years magazines such as U.S. News and World Report have sought to resolve those debates, too). There is also something about competition in sports that reminds people of courage and even victory in war. (It is not coincidental that the image of the arms race keeps reappearing in stories about intercollegiate sports.) Seeking anything but the top of the sports rankings may seem like surrender."
And that's the problem. Sports is the only thing colleges do that can be quantified. It provides the only concrete claim a college can make to being better than another college. Is Harvard better than Yale? Impossible to say. But which school won the Harvard-Yale football game last year? That's an easy question to answer.
The U.S. News rankings have changed that. Critics of the rankings charge that they're meaningless, but the critics are missing the point. Of course it's meaningless to say that the University of Virginia is the twenty-third best school in America and Georgetown is the twenty-fourth. But the point is not whether the rankings are accurate in any sense, as if such rankings could ever be anything but vaguely arbitrary. The point is that by trying to quantify educational quality -- however imperfectly -- U.S. News sends a strong message that college academics matter and provides an incentive for universities to counterbalance the longstanding athletic arms race with an academic arms race. And that balance is a good thing for higher education as a whole.
Shulman told me recently that the annual publicity surrounding the U.S. News survey has left almost all colleges with no choice but to devote energy to raising their rankings. Even colleges that deny making such efforts are probably doing so quietly, he says. Obsession with rankings is human nature -- people want to know what's best. In the absence of U.S. News, the only quantifiable game in higher education is sports. And that situation has real consequences for educational quality. "It does fill that gap much better than if sports is the only ranking you have out there," Shulman says of the U.S. News survey.
By creating another highly-publicized arms race, U.S. News has diluted the sometimes-harmful influence of the athletic arms race -- and somewhat refocused the public's attention on the primacy of academics in higher education. In April, everyone knows who won the Final Four. In January, everyone knows who won the Bowl Championship Series. And now, in September, a decent percentage of Americans know what the number one school in the country is -- and more importantly, how the public schools in their states, which are funded with their tax money, measure up. Whether these ratings are impeccably fair is less important than the fact that they exist. It's the spotlight they shine on academic quality, not the precision of the measurements, that really matters. And it seems safe to assume that without them, the pressure for colleges to make unwise choices in pursuit of athletic glory would grow even more overwhelming than it already is.
In the interest of full disclosure, I went to Princeton -- and yes, we've done pretty well in the U.S. News rankings recently, claiming the top spot three years in a row. But the rankings tend to even out and, over the course of many years, it's hard to say if they've been good for any one school in particular. What we know is that they've placed some much-needed focus on college academics, and that has been good for higher education as a whole.
Shulman told me there are three things college presidents brag about: sports titles, number of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty and U.S. News rankings. It's no coincidence those are three of the only attributes a college has that are catchy and quantifiable. There aren't many Nobel Prize winners to go around; take away both those and the rankings, and you're left with just sports. That's why the athletic arms race began, and why it continues. It's also why we need the U.S. News college rankings, imperfections and all.
