Interesting article in Inside Higher Ed:  A Less Rank Alternative, by Doug Lederman:

Britney Spears CDs. McDonald’s hamburgers. Sylvester Stallone movies. To the list of exports for which the United States might be less than fully proud, one might add commercially published rankings of colleges and universities. Since U.S. News & World Report first published its annual list of the best colleges 25 years ago, the phenomenon has exploded not only in the United States but in countries such as Australia, Canada, China, Italy, and Spain, often (perhaps not coincidentally) closely following the introduction of policies that require students and parents to pay their own tuition.

A new report by the Educational Policy Institute finds that many of the strengths and especially the perceived weaknesses that so many American college officials find in the U.S. News rankings — above all, the approach of weighting indicators to come up with one overarching “score” of quality — are replicated in the comparable lists in other countries. But the authors of the study also identify, in Germany, a possible way out, in which colleges there band together to collect and publish much more data and information than they now do in a way that enables individual consumers to decide which institutions to rank, and on what basis.

The study, A World of Difference: A Global Survey of University League Tables, was co-written by Alex Usher, a vice president at the policy institute, a research associate there. It examines 16 national rankings from 10 countries and three systems that attempt to rate institutions from across the globe…

The rankings share some things in common. Most are produced by commercial publishing companies, and as a result are designed to tell a “story” that consumers can easily grasp. To do that, most try to boil a complex set of factors and data down into what the study calls “single, comparable” — and, one might add, easily digestible — “numerical indicators” of quality. The designers of each ranking system, of course, decide what measures to use and how to weigh them, and therefore define quality in their own way.