The rankings are an intrusion, in other words, into the serene life of a president. They're one of many indications that universities are no longer the ivory-tower institutions they once prided themselves on being. Fifty years ago, total enrollment in American higher education, though increasing rapidly, was about a sixth of what it is today. Higher education boomed because it stepped beyond its traditional role as a center for pure study and into the economic world. It successfully transformed itself into a combination research lab and personnel office for the United States, and the rest of society has eagerly accepted the change.
Employers trust university credentials completely.
To become large, national institutions, universities needed statistical means of evaluating prospective students and faculty and of justifying their government funding. During the middle decades of the century, they developed the techniques of a national marketplace. For professors, universities instituted an elaborate system of peer review, so that today there is a clear sense of who the top people in the country are in every specialty from particle physics to romantic poetry. At the same time, higher education adopted standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, which enabled them to put a number to every high school student's intellectual potential and thus to make nationwide comparisons among applicants. The power of a number.