MosesWrites

Rank Me Maybe

​​​Some of you may be similarly old enough to remember that great harbinger of the social media apocalypse, hot or not.com. Founded at the turn of the millennium, as elegantly simple as it was viciously offensive, the website allowed a user to upload their photo and then have millions of unknown netizens use a simple 1 to 10 scale to rate their beauty—attractiveness—sexiness—visual appeal—to rate whatever is captured by those three simple, but otherwise inscrutable, letters, h-o-t, or worse, the degree to which the nearly identical but significantly more nasty and soul-crushing three applied, n-o-t.

We’ve come a long way. Now, innocents and influencers alike can subject themselves to anxiety and self-doubt on a multitude of platforms, counting likes and impressions, collecting kind and cruel comments, capitalizing on endorsements made or the exploitative ilk of Only Fans.

Amongst polite company, however, we don’t make comparisons. Can we even? Especially amongst something so precious as knowledge, as invaluable as education?

Still, we love rankings! Airlines, appliances, apparel, what’s best? Why not schools?

Let me state clearly that I understand and fully agree with many of the critiques made: the perverse incentives created for institutions, the misleading false equivalencies, the distortion of exclusivity as quality, and more. I attended Reed, which famously rebuked US News in its early years and has ever since, and I’ve had many a conversation with Colin Diver, author of the excellent Breaking Ranks, who became Reed’s President when I served as the student body’s, in 2002.

Yet after more than a decade working in education in China, I’ve had to wrap my mind around the fact that many love—unapologetically—simple, enumerated lists, especially of colleges and universities.

I’m also intellectually curious about the extent to which, and how, we can make any sort of judgment about quality—whether or not we can make any claim to objective measure, either quantitative or qualitative.

Better for whom? At what cost? As a matter of degree?

I’ve found that for many families in China, rankings serve two purposes. First, they have real consequences, however misplaced, when it comes to companies' hiring practices or the ability to transfer household registration status to a first-tier city. Yet that’s grounded in the practical need for people to make sense of the unfamiliar, especially when deciding whether and where to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. ROI is real, and a half million put toward Princeton will, all things considered, get you more, and more easily, than the same spent at the yahoo academy for flat earth studies, even if it’s the best value, top-student satisfaction rated establishment in the distant districts of Arrakis.

I mean not to disparage. Indeed, I’ve dedicated myself to providing alternative, clear-sighted metrics to help families understand and make well-informed choices when it comes to higher education. I’m proud that I lead a school which, per capita, probably sends more students to liberal arts colleges than any other in China, and which explicitly prioritizes fit over fancy names, even if it may often put us at a competitive disadvantage.

Still, I’m struck that every time I complete a recommendation form for a student, I’m asked to rank. In many categories, sure, but overall, you want me to tell you who’s one of the best in my career? Which you’ll need to judge, relative to everyone else’s career? You want to know their GPA, yes, in context, but still, you want to know which student can handle calculus in tenth grade and which one thrives as the captain of the soccer team and so forth. Are they in the top 10% of their class?

We’ve all got to sort things out somehow. My only hope is that we can do so with more honesty and less righteousness, whether for or against rankings—hot or not—with the nuance that education ought to bring, versus yet more pandering and polarization. Current crises are much bigger than numbers.

15 June 2025