Malcolm Gladwell Podcast: Lord of the Rankings (Summary)

In the podcast ‘Lord of the rankings’, Malcolm Gladwell targets the issues and the whole

network behind University rankings. He does so in an investigatory manner where we, the

audience, and him are trying to figure out the truth by interrogating people. We learn from the

podcast that the idea behind the creation of university rankings was US news’ attempt to be

ranked at a higher place compared to its enemies such as Times magazine. Thus, the whole

idea of wanting to help undergraduate students figuring out which university would be the

best fit is abolished and we understand that personal reward played an important role in the

production of those rankings. Therefore, how accurate are they really? Would someone really

pay any attention in providing accurate data if it was solemnly based on personal interest?

Gladwell questioned a Reed college professor named Kelly and one of her students. They

claim to have produced a similar ranking table with 96% accuracy. From this table they

concluded that their own school was ranked a lot lower in the ‘official’ US News rankings

compared to what they calculated. From here we question ourselves; based on what are those

rankings made? The student explains how there are different categories, for instance class

size, graduation rate etc that play an important role in deciding on a school’s ranking.

Nonetheless, peer assessment is the most predominant category meaning that a school with

greater reputation will always be ranked higher. Not only does this category cause huge

unfairness, the way the data is collected is also completely absurd. A survey is sent to certain

University Directors, heads of admissions etc in which they will have a list of 200-800

schools and they need to scale those from one to five, one being the worst and five the best.

As we may already understand, it is impossible for someone to have a fair judgment about all

200 schools. Ali A. Houshmand, president of Rowan University stated how only five other

presidents have visited his university, one of which was his friend. Another president of an
important school states how ‘walking around the campus’ is considered visiting the school

and counts as a fair judgment in scaling that school. We can clearly see unfairness here, this

leads to the global issue of justice. It is not morally right to lie to students and to parents

about these rankings. Gladwell also points out the fact that, to wealthy people, ranking these

schools is just like checking boxes. It does not affect them or others. He describes how these

are based on feelings rather than experience and because it is based on feelings, prejudice is

likely to happen. In fact, black colleges come in the rankings with an automatic 35% discount

as they are ‘black’ colleges and so ‘worse’ than ‘white’ colleges. Thus the idea of prejudice

and racism also contributes to the justice that is clearly not being addressed here. At the end

of this podcast we really find ourselves wondering whether we should, then, trust these

rankings or not.