好英语网美国大学排名还有意义吗？
Yale’s law school made the stunning announcement last week that it would no longer participate in the influential rankings published annually by U.S. News & World Report. Given the outsize importance attributed to the rankings by prospective applicants and alumni, Yale’s decision sent shock waves through the legal profession, and indeed all of higher education. Yet the law schools at Harvard, Berkeley, Georgetown, Columbia, Stanford and Michigan quickly followed suit. Will the universities of which they are a part join the boycott? Will other colleges and professional schools do the same? Could this be the beginning of the end for college rankings?
耶鲁大学法学院上周宣布了一个令人震惊的消息，它将不再参与《美国新闻与世界报道》每年发布的有着巨大影响力的排名。鉴于申请者和校友对这些排名的高度重视，耶鲁大学的决定在法律界乃至整个高教界引起了震动。然而，哈佛大学、加大伯克利分校、乔治敦大学、哥伦比亚大学、斯坦福大学和密歇根大学的法学院迅速跟进。它们所在的大学会加入抵制吗？其他学院和专业院校也会这样做吗？这会是大学排名终结的开始吗？
I sure hope so.
我当然希望如此。
Since their emergence in 1983, the U.S. News college rankings have grown into a huge juggernaut. They have withstood decades of withering criticism — from journalists, university presidents and the U.S. secretary of education — that the methodology ignores the distinctive character of individual schools and drives institutions to abandon priorities and principles in favor of whatever tweaks will bump them up a notch or two.
自从1983年创立以来，《美国新闻与世界报道》的高校排行已经发展成为一股巨大的势力。数十年来，它们经受住了来自记者、大学校长和美国教育部长的尖锐批评，他们认为这种排名忽视了各校的鲜明特色，迫使大专院校放弃优先事项和原则，只重视那些有利于排名提升的事情。
U.S. News has shrugged off repeated demonstrations that its scoring system, which rests on unverified data, can be gamed. Columbia University submitted inflated statistics, and won itself second place in the 2022 “Best National Universities” list — just the latest and most visible example of this phenomenon.
事实多次证明，其基于未经验证数据的评分系统存在造假的可能性，《美国新闻与世界报道》对此一再否认。哥伦比亚大学提交了夸大的统计数据，结果在2022年的“美国最佳大学”排行榜上获得了第二名——这只是该现象一个最新和最明显的例子罢了。
Though nearly all professional educators disdain the rankings, only a few maverick schools before last week had dared to pull out. U.S. News effectively punished them by coming up with its own statistics to plug into the ranking formula. After Reed College (of which I was once president) pulled out in 1995, its ranking plummeted from the top to the bottom quartile. Columbia, under fire for its apparent reporting discrepancies, chose not to submit data for the latest ranking, and its position dropped to No. 18 from No. 2.
尽管几乎所有的专业教育工作者都对这些排名不屑一顾，但在上周之前，只有少数特立独行的学校敢退出评选。《美国新闻与世界报道》把自己的统计数据插入排名公式，从而有效地惩罚了那些学校。里德学院（我曾任校长）于1995年退出后，排名从高位骤降至底部25%区段。哥伦比亚大学由于上报明显有偏差的数据而受到抨击，选择不提交最新排名需要的数据，结果排名从第2位跌至第18位。
Reed College managed to survive its fall — indeed to thrive — by wearing its rebellious stance proudly, as a sign of its fierce commitment to intellectual rigor. The impact of Columbia’s recent demotion remains to be seen. But two students have already filed lawsuits alleging that the university’s inflated ranking score induced them to enroll under false pretenses.
里德学院成功地挺过了排名的下滑，甚至获得了蓬勃发展——通过自豪地展示自己的叛逆姿态，标志着它致力于学术严谨的坚定承诺。哥大最近降级的影响还有待观察。但两名学生已经提起诉讼，指控该大学以夸大的排名诱使他们入学，构成了欺诈。
It seems that most schools live in terror of a decline in their ranking, and for good reason. Scholarly research consistently shows that a significant drop in one year’s rankings correlates with a weaker applicant pool the next year. As one college president once told me, “I hate the rankings, but unilateral disarmament is suicide.”
似乎大多数学校都害怕排名下降，这种恐惧不无道理。学术研究一致表明，排名的显著下降与次年的申请人数减少存在相关性。正如一位大学校长曾经告诉我的那样，“我讨厌排名，但单边裁军无异于自杀。”
Yet, something tells me this time is different.
不过，我感觉这次不一样。
It’s much harder to dismiss Harvard, Yale and the other top-tier law schools than, say, Reed College or other onetime rankings holdouts such as St. John’s College. Those law schools sit at the peak of prestige, wealth and influence. Their actions are impossible to ignore.
与里德学院或其他曾经拒绝上榜的圣约翰学院等高校相比，哈佛、耶鲁和其他顶级法学院更难以忽视。这些法学院无论是声望、财富还是影响力都是拔尖的。人们对它们的行为不可能视而不见。
And their reasons for boycotting U.S. News are not just quibbles about ranking methodology or unreliable statistics. The deans are making a powerful claim that the formula used by U.S. News rewards wealth and privilege by subtly penalizing law schools that seek to provide access to the legal profession for people from less privileged backgrounds and help prepare their graduates for careers in public service.
他们抵制《美国新闻与世界报道》排名的原因不仅是因为排名方法或不可靠的统计数据的争议。这些院长们强有力地宣称，他们认为该排名采用的计算方法通过巧妙地惩罚那些试图为出身不那么优越的人提供进入法律行业的机会的法学院，以及那些帮助他们的毕业生为公共服务职业做准备的法学院，来奖励财富和特权。
Some observers have speculated that this explanation may conceal other motives, such as a desire to circumvent the Supreme Court’s expected decision outlawing racial preferences for admissions. Or that Harvard (No. 4) and Berkeley (No. 9) are simply dissatisfied with their current rankings, though that would hardly explain top-ranked Yale. The risks of being punished by U.S. News are so big, however, that I think we must take the deans at their word and therefore focus our attention on the merits of their objections, rather than speculate about their motives.
有些观察者猜测，这种解释可能掩盖了其他动机，比如希望规避最高法院将录取决定中的种族偏好宣布为非法的预期裁决。或者排名第四的哈佛和排名第九的伯克利只不过是对目前的排名不满，虽然这无法解释排名第一的耶鲁为何抵制。但由于被《美国新闻与世界报道》在排名上进行惩罚的风险如此之大，以至于我认为我们必须相信这些院长们的话，从而将我们的注意力集中在他们反对的合理性上，而不是去猜测他们的动机。
And the law school deans’ argument applies to undergraduate college rankings as well, for most of the same reasons.
法学院院长们提出的理由也适用于本科院校的排名，因为反对本科院校排名的理由大致相同。
These rankings rely on various “student selectivity” measures, such as the standardized test scores of entering classes and, for some graduate schools, the school’s acceptance rate. The rankings have encouraged admissions offices to give more weight to test scores, to expand binding early decision programs and to greatly increase merit (rather than need-based) financial aid — practices that favor wealthier applicants, often at the expense of their lower-income peers.
这些排名依赖于各种各样的“学生择优录取”标准，比如入学的标准化考试成绩，对一些研究生院来说，还有学校的录取率。这些排名鼓励招生办公室更看重考试成绩，扩大具有约束力的提前录取决定招生名额，大幅增加基于成绩（而不是基于需求）的补助金额——这些做法有利于较富裕的申请人，往往以牺牲低收入的同龄人为代价。
The “outcome” measures used by U.S. News, such as overall graduation rates or, for graduate schools, postgraduate employment success, further encourage schools to admit applicants who are already programmed for success. And although many schools want to encourage more students to pursue public-service careers, succeeding at that goal may well cost them points in the U.S. News scoring system because salaries for those jobs are relatively low.
《美国新闻与世界报道》采用的“结果”衡量标准，如总体毕业率，或对研究生院而言是毕业生就业上的成功，进一步鼓励学校录取那些本就有望成功的申请人。尽管许多学校希望鼓励更多学生从事公共服务工作，但在这个目标上的成功很可能会让它们在《美国新闻与世界报道》的评级系统中丢分，因为公共服务工作的工资相对较低。
Another problem with the rankings is that they equate academic quality with institutional wealth (as measured by financial resources per student, faculty salaries and the like). This encourages admissions preferences for full-paying students, legacies and children of wealthy donors, which in turn helps to fuel the spending and fund-raising arms race that already afflicts higher education. At the same time, the ranking formulas give schools no credit for their spending on need-based financial aid, although U.S. News does give colleges some credit for having a high graduation rate for students who have received federal Pell Grants.
这些排名的另一个问题是，它们将学术质量与学校财富等同起来（比如使用平均到学生头上的财力资源、教师工资等计量标准）。这鼓励了对缴纳全额学费的学生、父亲或母亲曾就读该校的学生，以及富有捐赠者子女的录取偏好，也反过来助长了已经困扰高等教育的支出和募捐军备竞赛。与此同时，《美国新闻与世界报道》的排名公式对学校提供基于需求的助学金方面的支出没有加分，尽管公式中对获得联邦政府佩尔助学金学生的高毕业率有一定的加分。
Even the belated attempt by U.S. News to reward schools for having low student debt loads can backfire, by encouraging them to admit more high-income students who will not need to borrow.
就连《美国新闻与世界报道》在学校排名中对学生债务负担较低的学校给予迟来的奖励这一尝试也能带来适得其反的结果，因为这鼓励学校录取更多不需要贷款的高收入学生。
Some educators say that U.S. News — for all its failings — is still the best available measure of institutional performance. But I hope many others will publicly acknowledge that the time has come to break the U.S. News habit.
一些教育工作者表示，尽管《美国新闻与世界报道》的排名存在种种缺陷，但它仍是衡量学校表现的最佳标准。但我希望许多其他人将公开承认，是摒弃这一排名的时候了。
As schools further down the pecking order stop taking the rankings seriously, applicants will be free to create their own criteria for excellence, unearthing information from guidebooks, government databases and school websites. In other words, applicants to colleges and law schools will need to do their own homework instead of relying on a magazine to do it for them.
随着排名靠后的学校不再认真对待排名，申请者以后可以从指南书、政府数据库，以及学校的网站挖掘信息，自由地制定自己的优秀标准。换句话说，申请读本科和法学院的学生需要自己做功课，而不是依赖一本杂志为他们做功课。
Meanwhile, educators, freed from the U.S. News straitjacket, will be liberated to pursue their distinctive educational missions: to set their own priorities; to focus more intently on what students learn, which now receives no weight in the ranker’s calculus; to take chances on more promising applicants from less privileged backgrounds; and to prepare graduates for a broader range of fulfilling careers. They will, in short, return to higher education’s historical function as an engine of social mobility and service for the public good.
与此同时，从排名的束缚中解放出来的教育者们可以自由地追求他们独特的教育使命：制定自己的优先事项；将精力更多地集中在学生们学到的东西上，这在目前的排名计算中没有任何比重；大胆地录取那些来自不那么优越的家庭、有望成功的申请者；为毕业生们在更广泛的领域从事有成就感的工作做准备。简言之，这将让学校回归高等教育作为社会流动引擎、为公共利益服务的历史功能。