Universities say they hate magazines’ best and worst rankings. Oh, really?

If you are exhausted by the frantic pace of the for-profit markets and yearn for the tranquility of the nonprofits, yearn again. Nonprofits are experiencing calamitous times. And not because money is short. The problem that colleges, churches and museums are experiencing is excess supply. There are simply too many college classrooms, too much gallery space and too many pews.

A central doctrine of Marketing 101 is that when a market is oversupplied with interchangeable products, branding behavior starts. If you can’t demonstrate intrinsic differences between fungibles, you have to concoct differences. Think bottled water. You drink Evian’s advertising, not the fluid.

Don’t believe me? Ask the Guggenheim Museum and Smithsonian what Armani clothing and Star Wars memorabilia are doing deep within their hallowed halls or ask your local minister why the nondenominational megachurch down at the mall is offering shame-free services complete with support groups for soccer moms.

My own business — higher education — is doing the same sort of thing. But there’s a twist here. Most universities are sheep. They’re branding themselves in only one way: to get the highest ranking possible in the annual college ratings done by U.S. News & World Report. What a shame. And what hypocrisy. If you ask academic administrators about the rating systems they will become apoplectic. “We won’t pander to some newsmagazine’s idea of what we should be offering,” they will say. Then they will furiously try all kinds of harmful strategies to do better in the ratings, especially by looking highly selective. It’s called massaging the yield — the percentage of accepted students who then enroll. To ratchet up that number they adopt early-decision policies (which bind kids to the school), accept upper-level transfers and even refuse qualified candidates who they suspect will go elsewhere.

As Rachel Toor, a former admissions officer at Duke University, says in her book Admissions Confidential: “I travel around the country whipping kids (and their parents) into a frenzy so that they will apply. I tell them how great a school Duke is academically and how much fun they will have socially. Then, come April, we reject most of them.” After all, the best kids will probably go elsewhere, and we can’t have that ruining our yield number.

Meanwhile, schools will overlook funding the library and teaching staff in order to increase spending on what are now called “competitive amenities” like deluxe dorms and grandiose athletic facilities. Who cares if most of your teaching is done by adjunct faculty or graduate students? And who cares about the curriculum? You need to brand by looking good in those ratings.

Even the seemingly endless pledge drives, essentially perpetual begathons, are couched in terms not of excellence but as a way to improve ranking. So the University of Richmond named one of its campaigns Top Tier Initiative. From a branding point of view that makes sense — you get points in the rankings for big endowments. If you want to see where the money goes, look at the new mutant of the college catalog sent to prospective students. It’s appropriately called a view-book, a glossy brochure that often costs the schools a dollar a pop.

If universities want a more realistic way of branding themselves, they should release statistics gathered by the National Survey of Student Engagement (called Nessie and funded by the Pew and Carnegie foundations) about how consumers — whoops! — students really feel about their higher education experience. That the elite schools keep these meaningful figures to themselves is eloquent acknowledgment of how anxious this market really is.

What’s the solution? Quit providing the selectivity numbers. Spend money on the intellectual plant — the library, medium-level-professors’ salaries, smaller class size. Dramatically shrink expensive graduate programs when their only purpose is to provide cheap teaching assistants and maintain high rankings in fields for which there is no job market. Stop the arms race! There are plenty of empty seats available at perfectly good schools around the country. If the upper-tier universities were really committed to education they would direct our attention to where it belongs: K-12 is going up in smoke.

— James B. Twitchell is a professor of advertising at the University of Florida. This column was first

published in Forbes Magazine.