Welcome to the big time, Alabama!

The U.S. News rankings turn out to be full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. One common statistic used to evaluate colleges, for example, is called “graduation rate performance,” which compares a school’s actual graduation rate with its predicted graduation rate given the socioeconomic status and the test scores of its incoming freshman class. It is a measure of the school’s efficacy: it quantifies the impact of a school’s culture and teachers and institutional support mechanisms. Tulane, given the qualifications of the students that it admits, ought to have a graduation rate of eighty-seven per cent; its actual 2009 graduation rate was seventy-three per cent. That shortfall suggests that something is amiss at Tulane.

Another common statistic for measuring college quality is “student selectivity.” This reflects variables such as how many of a college’s freshmen were in the top ten per cent of their high-school class, how high their S.A.T. scores were, and what percentage of applicants a college admits. Selectivity quantifies how accomplished students are when they first arrive on campus.

Each of these statistics matters, but for very different reasons. As a society, we probably care more about efficacy: America’s future depends on colleges that make sure the students they admit leave with an education and a degree. If you are a bright high-school senior and you’re thinking about your own future, though, you may well care more about selectivity, because that relates to the prestige of your degree.

But no institution can excel at both. The national university that ranks No. 1 in selectivity is Yale. A crucial part of what it considers its educational function is to assemble the most gifted group of freshmen it can. Because it maximizes selectivity, though, Yale will never do well on an efficacy scale. Its freshmen are so accomplished that they have a predicted graduation rate of ninety-six per cent: the highest Yale’s efficacy score could be is plus four. (It’s actually plus two.) Of the top fifty national universities in the “Best Colleges” ranking, the least selective school is Penn State. Penn State sees its educational function as serving a wide range of students. That gives it the opportunity to excel at efficacy—and it does so brilliantly. Penn State’s freshmen have an expected graduation rate of seventy-three per cent and an actual graduation rate of eighty-five per cent, for a score of plus twelve: no other school in the U.S. News top fifty comes close.

There is no right answer to how much weight a ranking system should give to these two competing values. It’s a matter of which educational model you value more—and here, once again, U.S. News makes its position clear. It gives twice as much weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness. By contrast, to the extent that Penn State succeeds at doing a better job of being Penn State—of attracting a diverse group of students and educating them capably—it will only do worse. Rankings are not benign. They enshrine very particular ideologies, and, at a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors. And why? Because a group of magazine analysts in an office building in Washington, D.C., decided twenty years ago to value selectivity over efficacy, to use proxies that scarcely relate to what they’re meant to be proxies for, and to pretend that they can compare a large, diverse, low-cost land-grant university in rural Pennsylvania with a small, expensive, private Jewish university on two campuses in Manhattan.

“If you look at the top twenty schools every year, forever, they are all wealthy private universities,” Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State, told me. “Do you mean that even the most prestigious public universities in the United States, and you can take your pick of what you think they are—Berkeley, U.C.L.A., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Illinois, Penn State, U.N.C.—do you mean to say that not one of those is in the top tier of institutions? It doesn’t really make sense, until you drill down into the rankings, and what do you find? What I find more than anything else is a measure of wealth: institutional wealth, how big is your endowment, what percentage of alumni are donating each year, what are your faculty salaries, how much are you spending per student. Penn State may very well be the most popular university in America—we get a hundred and fifteen thousand applications a year for admission. We serve a lot of people. Nearly a third of them are the first people in their entire family network to come to college. We have seventy-six per cent of our students receiving financial aid. There is no possibility that we could do anything here at this university to get ourselves into the top ten or twenty or thirty—except if some donor gave us billions of dollars.”In the fall of 1913, the prominent American geographer Ellsworth Huntington sent a letter to two hundred and thirteen scholars from twenty-seven countries. “May I ask your cooperation in the preparation of a map showing the distribution of the higher elements of civilization throughout the world?” Huntington began, and he continued:

My purpose is to prepare a map which shall show the distribution of those characteristics which are generally recognized as of the highest value. I mean by this the power of initiative, the capacity for formulating new ideas and for carrying them into effect, the power of self-control, high standards of honesty and morality, the power to lead and to control other races, the capacity for disseminating ideas, and other similar qualities which will readily suggest themselves.

Each contributor was given a list of a hundred and eighty-five of the world’s regions—ranging from the Amur district of Siberia to the Kalahari Desert—with instructions to give each region a score of one to ten. The scores would then be summed and converted to a scale of one to a hundred. The rules were strict. The past could not be considered: Greece could not be given credit for its ancient glories. “If two races inhabit a given region,” Huntington specified further, “both must be considered, and the rank of the region must depend upon the average of the two.” The reputation of immigrants could be used toward the score of their country of origin, but only those of the first generation. And size and commercial significance should be held constant: the Scots should not suffer relative to, say, the English, just because they were less populous. Huntington’s respondents took on the task with the utmost seriousness. “One appreciates what a big world this is and how little one knows about it when he attempts such a task as you have set,” a respondent wrote back to Huntington. “It is a most excellent means of taking the conceit out of one.” England and Wales and the North Atlantic states of America scored a perfect hundred, with central and northwestern Germany and New England coming in at ninety-nine.