This doesn't seem all that controversial at face value. Rankings are supposedly not impacted by your willingness to buy a badge. It's literally just a logo, a license to promote your ranking.
I think U.S. News runs a business that will always attract controversy and criticism in its attempt to rank something that is arguably impossible to rank. There's a demand for guidance in a world where choosing something like a university based on completely unknown future results that can't be pinned down to a universal equation is a pretty anxiety-inducing choice.
I don't know if I am going to meet my co-founder of the next Google at Harvard or at University of Massachusetts Amherst. I don't know if I'm going to meet a better spouse at Yale or Cornell. I don't know if I'm going to like my professors more at Stanford or Berkley.
The rankings are just satisfying that desire, and in doing so they're bound to be inaccurate for a large percentage of the people who are using them as a guide.
Anytime you have rankings of highly multi-dimensional and at least somewhat subjective things there are basically always going to be accusations of bias and conflicts of interest or at least the appearance of such when money is involved and observers are inclined to believe someone has a thumb on the scale.
In the case of university rankings, two things are almost certainly true: There are many more than ten "Top 10" schools depending upon your interests and the luck of the draw and, for many many people, some little community college is going to be a much better experience than MIT.
> Anytime you have rankings of highly multi-dimensional and at least somewhat subjective things there are basically always going to be accusations of bias
That's because you will always have bias. You cannot do dimensional reduction on systems without losing information unless the dimension you are reducing to is at least as large as the number of independent variables (trying to use close to plain English here). US News has a one-dimensional ranking and certainly there are more than one independent variable that needs be considered for comparing institutions, so it must have bias.
I think U.S. News runs a business that will always attract controversy and criticism in its attempt to rank something that is arguably impossible to rank. There's a demand for guidance in a world where choosing something like a university based on completely unknown future results that can't be pinned down to a universal equation is a pretty anxiety-inducing choice.
I don't know if I am going to meet my co-founder of the next Google at Harvard or at University of Massachusetts Amherst. I don't know if I'm going to meet a better spouse at Yale or Cornell. I don't know if I'm going to like my professors more at Stanford or Berkley.
The rankings are just satisfying that desire, and in doing so they're bound to be inaccurate for a large percentage of the people who are using them as a guide.