Bard College to boycott U.S. News & World Report rankings

Bard College announced it will cease to participate in the annual U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings.

“The educational character and comparative merits of colleges cannot be distilled into a uniform numerical ranking,” said Leon Botstein, president of the Annandale-on-Hudson school.

“Particularly one that does not take into account the curriculum and faculty and is based on flawed and irrelevant metrics, many of which concern only institutional wealth. When these rankings began, I predicted ”” wrongly ”” that they would not be taken seriously. Instead, the most powerful and established institutions benefited and went along with a ranking system that trivialized higher education. We have allowed teaching and scholarship in America to be driven by a magazine.”

Botstein noted that other colleges along with law schools and medical schools have also withdrawn from the U.S. News rankings.

“There is real momentum to lift the curtain behind this Wizard of Oz scheme,” Botstein added. “We have a chance now to break free from this alchemy of simplification. The public deserves a more thorough and transparent account of our institutions of learning.”

Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona called on institutions to “stop worshiping at the false altar of U.S. News & World Report.” Speaking at a conference hosted at Harvard Law School, Cardona complained that the magazine”™s ranking systems serves to “discourage institutions with the largest endowments and greatest capacity to enroll and graduate more underserved students from doing so because it may hurt their selectivity. Instead, the most life-changing higher education opportunities go to young people who already have every socioeconomic advantage.”

The law schools at Harvard and Yale announced late last year that they would boycott the magazine”™s rankings. However, U.S. News said it would continue to rank the non-participating law schools based on publicly available data through the American Bar Association.