RANT: Yours truly has long disliked the overemphasis placed on university rankings in popular news sources with their arbitrary weightings of particular indexes. Inside Higher Ed today reports that a former dean at Temple U and other officials have been indicted by the feds for giving phony data to US News, a magazine which apparently admits it doesn't verify the info it receives. Yours truly could certainly understand that Temple might want to take action in this case. But resources spent on a federal indictment?
Isn't the bigger scandal the publishing of info without verifying it, particularly when it is known that there are big incentives to provide phony data to inflate rankings? Yours truly is less interested in the legal technicalities at issue here than in the misplaced priority. Let US News deal with the problem of relying on unverified data; it is profiting from offering supposedly meaningful rankings. And let the feds go after, say, some Big Time drug dealers.
Inside Higher Ed's story is at:
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