Ranking College Ranks: Institutional Quality as a Latent Variable.

College ranks are a highly charged feature of the American educational landscape. The most influential ranks are those published by the national periodical US News & World Report, and universities regularly trumpet their standings in the USN&WR ranks whenever they are able to do so. Although organizations that publish college ranks claim that their figures can distinguish minute gradations in quality across educational institutions, we show using scaling techniques that the information content in USN&WR ranks is much lower than the USN&WR organization might care to admit. Namely, our results show that USN&WR ranks cannot distinguish between the topmost educational institutions in the country. More generally, the results show that latent variables, like quality levels of academic institutions, should always be accompanied by measures of uncertainty so that users of the levels are not lulled into a false sense security in assuming that the levels are much more precise than they actually are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]