The flaws of US News and World Report's College Ranking

I regarded the US News World Report's college ranking as the gold standard when I was applying to US schools. My faith in it faded slightly over time for various reasons. It is their ranking of a bunch of PRC colleges in the top 1% that made me realize the deep flaws of the ranking.

The primary function of a college is education of which critical independent thinking is the most important part. How can a college with little academic freedom and a lot of mandatory indoctrination be ranked among the world's top 1%?

The ranking is largely about research. 


I fully appreciate the high correlation between research and education, but there are two issues for this method:

1. The correlation is not a simple linear relationship.

2. Their way of research assessment is flawed - the PRC is not a normal free country. You cannot apply the same method used for a normal country to the PRC. Academic fraud in the PRC is rampant.

For example, with their method, the Chinese middle school dropout would be ranked the #1 prolific researcher in human history because During this 3-year PART-TIME study for his JD while being a governor, he was the principal investigator of 3 research projects all of which won top awards, and published 5 books and 33 papers. The fact is that he even struggles to read scripts in his own native language.

One may argue that STEM is largely immune to brainwashing. No, they are not for the following reasons:

1. STEM students in the PRC are mandated to take brainwashing courses for at least 4 semesters.

2. The middle school dropout's thought is creeping into every field.



3. Most importantly, a strictly top-down authoritarian system shapes herd minds not independent ones.

Let's use restaurant ranking as an analogy. Would you rank a restaurant that forces every customer to eat some unhealthy or even poisonous food top 1% because it has a few good chefs and some tasty ingredients?

By no means do I suggest US News and World Report's' college ranking is meritless. It can be used as one useful metric but its ranking of colleges under the strict control of totalitarian regimes should be ignored.

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