Once again U.S. News and World Report has issued its rankings of graduate and professional school programs. In fact, the rankings were “leaked” to the blogosphere two days ago, so academics across the U.S. have been busily gloating if their programs went up in the rankings, coming up with rationalizations if they went down, and privately telling each other that the rankings are irrelevant anyway. Administrators, on the other hand are busy working with their P.R. people either to publicize their victories or explain away their failures. Somewhere in some university somewhere a department chair or a dean will be preparing a resignation letter. Most will have an extra drink or two. A few will send out fund-raising letters.

In my opinion, and that’s all it is, the U.S. News rankings are mostly just entertainment designed to sell magazines. There is no doubt that some potential students consult them, but I don’t think that the rankings are a determinative factor in student choices very often. Most students are far more savvy than that. Alumni do often pay attention. If a program’s rankings go up, then it provides a certain degree of bragging rights and, if they go down, it’s a reason to write a nasty letter to the university, always a fun way of passing the time. But the idea that minor variations in rankings mean much of anything is rather silly. Law faculty blogs have been filled over the past few days with triumphant statements by everybody who didn’t attend NYU Law School that NYU dropped a few points in the rankings this year. But it is the same law school this year as it was last year. And, truthfully, it’s just as good or bad as it was last year. I have no doubt that some of my friends who teach at Columbia are having a grand old time insulting their downtown colleagues, but that’s about the only importance the change has.

Of course, administrators have to be very careful about touting their schools’ going up in the rankings. Several years ago a law school dean issued a press release when his school’s rank moved up from the “second tier” and broke into the top fifty at number 49. He was foolish enough to say that this showed how much his school had improved under his leadership and that this signified a new level of academic excellence. Unfortunately for him, his school’s rank dropped several points the next year and the university’s president fired him. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Which, of course, brings me to KU. It didn’t take the university long to announce all of its highly ranked programs on its webpage. Of course, we never talk about the not so highly ranked programs. And it’s a good thing we don’t. For one thing, to do so would insult a large number of faculty and students. But, in a sense, we validate the rankings by talking about them at all and we do insult those hard-working faculty and students who didn’t make it into whatever “top” category we choose to highlight, at least by implication. And I think that’s a foolish thing to do, unless we think that U.S. News really is capable of making accurate judgments about every university program it ranks, which it isn’t. Academic programs don’t have win-lose records to make rankings reliable.

There’s also an element of “spin” about our bragging about rankings. At KU we don’t actually quote the U.S. News rankings as published. Instead, we talk about our rank among “public universities.” U.S. News lumps publics and privates together in most of its rankings. Whether or not it is unfair to do this is debatable. On the other hand, if we’re going to talk about the U.S. News rankings, why don’t don’t we actually use their rankings as they are published. The short answer, I think, is that KU doesn’t look as good if we do that. In other words, we put a bit of spin on the U.S. News figures to make us look better.

The point of this blog is that I think we put too much emphasis on what U.S. News thinks. Case in point: this year KU Law was ranked slightly lower than last year [which is not mentioned on the KU webpage], but the difference is as much a function of how many schools tied for ranks above us as anything else. A more significant change, however, was that the ranking for the University of Missouri Law School dropped quite a bit, far below where it has been in years past. This year KU ranks significantly above MU. In the past decade we’ve always ranked about the same. Personally, I think that KU Law and MU Law are quite comparable schools. Does this change in U.S. News rank mean that MU has suddenly become a worse school. I doubt it very much. More than likely, either MU made an error in the complex forms all schools submit to U.S. News or U.S. News messed up or this is just another example of the unreliability of the rankings.

As always, university administrators will continue to publicize increases in the rankings, explain away decreases, and “spin” the numbers as much as they can to make themselves look good. I think it would be a far better use of staff time and university resources to simply ignore the rankings and concentrate on the truly important stuff: teaching our students and doing research which has real value to our state and country. Let’s leave worry about rankings to the Athletics Association.

On a much more significant topic: don’t forget that the new season of Dr. Who begins this weekend.