The Corsair
Elon Musk’s Strange Obsession with Genghis Khan. Is this the beginning of the end of the US News & World Report College Rankings? Taylor Swift vs. Ticketmaster
Elon Musk’s Strange Obsession with Genghis Khan
I .. don’t even know where to begin.
Libertarian tech bro. Billionaire. Authoritarian fascination. Creepy sex. Eugenics. This story has got it all, as far as 21st century Big Evil goes …
Is this the beginning of the end of the US News & World Report College Rankings?
God, I hope so.
This week has seen a slow-building avalanche against the US News & World Report law school ranking methodology. That methodology heavily favors the bigger, older schools with large endowments (Faculty Resources and Funding together account for 30% of a school’s rank). And so this influential sham favors the older, richer schools and the smaller schools, regardless of their merits and the lives they change, do not stand a chance. “These types of college ranking systems oversimplify and distort the value of a higher education degree, placing a premium on perceived prestige and reputation at the expense of students, institutions, and our society, writes Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post. “(The 4,000 institutions of higher education nationwide) all have unique missions and they all have the potential to improve a student’s life prospects just as much as the top-ranked schools in the U.S. News rankings.”
Two days ago, Yale Law School left the USNWR rankings. This is particularly significant news because Yale has been at or near the top spot since the magazine began ranking in the 1980s. “Over the last few years, U.S. News has begun to adopt metrics that have become increasingly damaging to the profession,” Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken told the Yale Daily News. “They’re making it harder and harder for other law schools to do the right thing.”
Last year, Columbia Law School pulled out of the rankings altogether after a math professor shocked the academic world by whistleblowing on false information Columbia was submitting in order to get into the “top tier.” And in the last 24 hours, Berkeley and Harvard, two more of the “upper tier” of law schools joined Yale Law in the USNWRexit. Can we expect many more Law Schools to join this conscious uncoupling of law schools and US News and World Report? I expect so.
But why has it taken so long for schools to stand up to this dubious methodology that purports to know “the best” law and liberal arts regional and medical schools?
From Elie Mystal at The Nation:
The U.S. News rankings are influential, and problematic. The metrics used by U.S. News are only obtainable through data that is self-reported by the schools. By pulling out, Yale and Harvard will deprive U.S. News of the data it needs to make its rankings sausage.
The decisions by Yale and Harvard affects only the law schools—as of this writing, the colleges, as well as the other graduate schools at the universities, will still participate and provide data to U.S. News. But the law school rankings are the most important rankings provided by U.S. News. That’s because of how those rankings affect the decisions of students and employers in the legal field. Frankly, you just don’t see high school students choosing between colleges as different as Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA based on where those schools land on the magazine’s list. But you do see would-be law students make life-changing decisions based on the law school rankings. Whether one wants to live in Los Angeles or Chicago should be an easy choice, but, because Northwestern is ranked 13 while UCLA is ranked 15, we regularly see students braving whatever the hell the “lake snow effect” is supposed to be solely to gain two spots in the U.S. News rankings. In my career, I have encountered countless law students who say that the rankings were the single most important factor in their decision about where to go to law school.
Not only that, but the sheer power of the rankings in determining the future of grads never fails to amaze. Schools go to great lengths just to cling to even the second tier! “I know a bunch of Fordham Law School and BC Law grads who will tell you otherwise,” said an anonymous poster on Twitter. “I clerked in the SDNY and the 2CA at a time when my law school alma mater was clinging to a 20-25 spot. It's now in the mid-30s and appellate clerkships are a rarity for current students.”
And its not just law schools! There are also the regional rankings, and the top liberal arts rankings and the medical school rankings. How can one, as far as the liberal arts schools go, compare a Bennington College to a Swarthmore College or a University of Puget Sound? Different kettles of fish, all. Each are independent private liberal arts schools, but all are profoundly different in what they offer to students. A liberal arts college can be highly Socratic in its teaching methods, like St. Johns College. Or a liberal arts school can be heavy on lectures, note-taking and testing, like the Naval Academy. Both are technically liberal arts schools that exist in Annapolis, Maryland, but to compare the two and rank them in a single category is a patently enterprise.
As far as where to learn about liberal arts schools, there are alternative college guides, smarter publications like Fiske and also Loren Pope’s influential Colleges That Change Lives. The Fiske and Pope Guides don’t even attempt anything as foolish as ranking apples and oranges, Emerson and Claremont McKenna.
Taylor Swift vs. Ticketmaster
“"It's truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” says Taylor Swift of Ticketmaster. (Billboard)
“The overarching lesson of Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall is that the gauzy philosophical natterings of CEOs are just meant to distract us from their real goal: accumulating cash without interference.” (Kate Aronoff/TNR)
The pollster who predicted a “red wave” explains himself. (NYMag)
Kathy Griffith is unbanned from Twitter. (Variety)
“She Said, which expands on the book of the same name, follows (Megan) Twohey and (Jodi) Kantor after they begin receiving tips about Weinstein’s abusive behavior, tracing their professional and personal lives in 2016 and 2017 as they uncover more and more about the system that kept the film producer in power despite decades of whispers (and more than whispers).” (THR)
There is no replacement for Black twitter. (WIRED)
“Asked why he’s never directed a superhero flick, Tarantino remained withering. ‘You have to be a hired hand to do those things,’ he said. ‘I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.’” (NME)