Let’s suppose for a moment, (this is purely hypothetical, of course) that there is a small group of elite institutions of higher education. And suppose that each is about of equal caliber, each attracting roughly the same quality of students. This would present us with a perfectly symmetric system, a veritable boulder sitting atop a hill. However, as admissions to these highly selective institutions become more sought over, companies begin to see a business opportunity. For instance, the News Corporation, which publishes a weekly periodical, begins to rank these virtually equivalent schools to sell more issues. The only problem is that the quality of a school is far from quantifiable, depending on countless factors, some of which are independent to each student. So this News Corporation decides to pick somewhat arbitrary measures of a school’s quality: admissions rates, average standardized testing scores of its admits, etc. As chances have it, the measures that they use, for this particular year, give the number one spot to a given school that we’ll call School H, the number two spot to School P, and so on.

Here’s where the unforeseen consequences take place. Since potential applicants to these institutions are clamoring for quantified, easy to understand information about their prospective choices, they turn to the rankings to help them make their decision. Assuming that there are no other outside influences, all of the best candidates naturally make College H their first choice, College P their second choice, and so on. As a result, College H gets the greatest pool of applicants, and in turn, the lowest admissions rate, and the highest average score on standardized tests. The impact of this turn of events is twofold. Not only does the ranking propagate itself since it influences that very statistics it measures, but as more of the best and the brightest flock to School H, the other, otherwise equally good, colleges are left with smaller and less qualified applicant pools. Not only does this fact hurt the other school’s rankings, but it actually hurts the quality of the institution, since the caliber of the students influences the caliber of the school. Once again, the ranking propagates itself, widening the gap between the schools, and this time, actually causing such a disparity to exist.

Clearly, and unfortunately, a similar situation exists in real life. In Time Magazine, a few months back, a reporter noted that Harvard is miles ahead of the competition in prestige. And here at Cornell, you can’t go more than a few weeks without bumping into a mention of the US News and World Report rankings. Even though we all know that trying to quantify an entire college into a single number is absurd, prospective applicants seek guidance from the rankings. Further, since these rankings have a self-propagating nature, the problem, left alone, may only get worse.