Hence the poll fetish that is sweeping throughout the world inspired, if that is the word, by number-crunchers. Rankings, of course, are only as good as data, and data are smeared with fingerprints. Everyone who uses ratings, rankings and prize lists should keep salt-shakers with fat holes at the ready. Surely the Nobel list might suffer if readers understood that neither Tolstoy, Henry James nor Borges was honored. Yet the mania spreads far and wide as competition knows no bounds, whether it be for the Booker Prize or prospects for medical school admissions and legal partnerships.
Shame fails to stop the high-rankers from touting their high ranks without itemizing the footnotes.
According to Larry Van Dyne's informative piece in the September Washingtonian, this is U. S. News' best-selling issue of the year, a total of 2.3 million issues including subscriptions and newsstand sales. Van Dyne writes that colleges have been known to resort to such techniques as sending cookies to prospective applicants to enlarge their pool, thereby pumping up their selectivity ratio, which is a factor that U. S. News takes into account. University presidents, who know on what list their bread is buttered, lobby at U. S. News offices. It's spin, spin, spin for the home team. In a recent issue of Insights, the journal of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, Professors Tom Goldstein of Berkeley and Ted Glasser of Stanford raise nettlesome questions about the rankings of graduate schools.