The first US News & World Report college rankings appeared in 1983, the same year I was born. Home was a Pittsburgh suburb situated between one of the region’s richest zip codes and a former steel town named for the company that gave it life, and then left. For my parents, owning a house in a neighborhood located almost equidistant between historical wealth and recent poverty must have seemed sure proof of success; still, even then, the kind of education the US News rankings have come to represent remained a conception. My father took six years to complete his college degree, traversing junior colleges and baccalaureate institutions, and navigating roadblocks both economic and academic on the path to completion. My mother, who descended from Lithuanian immigrants, never countenanced such a course. Neither did her three siblings—or, years later, most of their own children, the cousins who constitute my extended family. And so, as I imagined life after high school, college rankings accordingly functioned as key sources of knowledge. My bedroom closet guarded a stack of books built of the Princeton Review, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, and more than one US News. This collection grew with every Saturday-afternoon trip to the local Borders, where the broad wooden benches served as host for hours of browsing the latest lists. My father anchored himself there, poring over the guides as if they had some secret to disclose that only considered study would reveal.

It was an act of love, I know now. But it was also born of necessity: College rankings stood in as a form of social capital, pointing the way to a life—intellectual, financial, and geographic—few in my family had experienced.

Casting a clarifying light on the rankings industry, Colin Diver’s 2022 book, Breaking Ranks, made me rethink my relationship to it. Across the decades of my adult life, Diver argues, college rankings have amounted to a flawed exercise in “assigning prestige points.” Breaking Ranks concludes that it would be better to “ignore” them, and that is, in fact, Diver’s primary message to advisers, educators, parents, and prospective college students. As a former college president and self-described “realist,” however, Diver understands that such counsel will be impossible to heed. In fact, Breaking Ranks mixes the language of drug addiction with romantic allure to characterize the effect of the rankings industry on the higher education landscape writ large. “The seduction begins the moment you start to focus on those numbers,” Diver explains. “You may think that you can treat them just as a starting point, a gateway into deeper, more qualitative explorations. But the promise of being told exactly where each school fits into the prestige hierarchy is often irresistible.”

Tracing the “seductive lure” across nearly three hundred searching pages, Breaking Ranks reveals just how inseparable a college education has become from the constituent parts of human life in the United States: economic and demographic trends; histories of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of gender, race, and class; and even, as the “siren song” metaphor implies, timeless truths of human psychology. Diver does not blame US News and other publications for creating the “underlying conditions” that have facilitated the “competitive frenzy” in which the rankings industry thrives. Decades-long transformations in attitudes about the government’s role in education, the divergence between physical and mental labor in the US economy, and the human constant of a “classist yearning for prestige” claim responsibility there. But rankings have made those qualities worse, ultimately encouraging us to mistake what should be viewed as “a long-term investment in human capacity … to lead a fulfilling life” in the rankest terms.

Especially today, as they strive to achieve levels of diversity that better reflect the world beyond, highly ranked colleges and universities too rarely represent an optimal space of democratic pluralism, laboratories for learning how to negotiate histories of inequality in an attempt to build a more equitable democratic order.

In a hauntingly prophetic report first issued in 1995, the American Association of Colleges and Universities already observed the decoupling of diversity and democracy in higher education. “Diversity without democracy has no moral compass,” the authors reminded readers, for it is only by way of the standard of “democratic values” that society “can be held accountable for delivering equal justice.” When the report was reissued in an updated form 20 years later, it noted that colleges had fully embraced the study of diversity, but democracy had disappeared from the curriculum altogether.

College rankings, in Diver’s book, measure all the worst qualities about higher education, and empower the wrong people to form those impressions. It’s a bracing analysis, and one that has brought me to an uncomfortable awareness about the ways the rankings industry shaped pretty much every one of my educational decisions, from my choice about which college acceptance letter to answer to, years later, my decision to leave Pittsburgh, again, and permanently, to attend the most highly ranked grad school that admitted me.

Was I seduced by money and prestige, which Diver associates with the cultural values of whiteness and wealth? I don’t doubt it. Addicted to the alluring numbers? Maybe. Still, recalling those Saturday afternoons on Borders benches in light of present-day efforts to refocus the civic mission of higher education makes me think there is more to my story, and to the story of college rankings in general. At the heart of Breaking Ranks, then, beats an abiding question: What, and whom, is college for?

In a 21st-century United States marked by a deteriorating democratic infrastructure whose fault lines run through our college campuses, the question has garnered renewed attention as well as a new urgency. According to one recent survey, American adults view higher education as a mark of individual accomplishment; whether higher education is a social good is much less certain. A June 2023 Gallup poll found that only 36 percent of respondents expressed confidence in higher education, nearly a 20 percent drop from 2015. Even as they are shaped by partisan identities, these numbers partake of broader trend lines that point to declining trust in institutions. Congress, for instance, landed in single digits in the Gallup poll.

When George Washington spoke to that body more than two centuries ago, in January 1790, he encouraged the establishment of a “national University.” “Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness,” Washington reminded his audience in his first State of the Union address. “In one, in which the measures of Government recieve their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in our’s, it is proportionably essential.”

Despite Americans’ misgivings, the contemporary university remains an essential institution for democracy. What Washington and the other founders understood about self-government has not changed: Democracy demands a people willing to live democratically, and those people arrive not ready-made but must commit themselves to a process of continuous cultivation. As one historian has put it, “The quality of our democracy depends on the quality of our citizens.”

In Diver’s tale, however, democracy has little to do with the way the rankings industry measures the quality of college education. The origin of the genre explains why.

One of the first stories about the US News rankings appeared in a December 1983 San Diego Union column. When Tom Blair reported on the list, he placed the announcement that San Diego State University stood “fourth-best … among comprehensive universities west of the Mississippi” alongside a series of equally inconsequential news items: an episode of auto vandalism suffered by a Chargers football-team staffer, and the names of the restaurants patronized by the city’s mayor.

Situating college rankings among such social trivia underscores at once the subjectivity inherent in the work of hierarchy making and rankings’ connection to reputational power. As Diver reveals, a precursor to the US News regime came in the form of “private rankings” that ordered colleges based on the names of graduates appearing in Who’s Who lists. And when US News published its first rankings in the early 1980s, their data derived from reputational surveys in which college presidents ranked their peers; what a university leader really knew about the schools they were asked to evaluate mattered little.

That changed in 1988, when US News adopted an objective statistic formula for ranking colleges. Institutions self-reported the requested data such as acceptance rates, student-faculty ratio, instructional dollars spent on each student, alumni giving rates, and other empirical metrics. (If a school did not provide the requested information, US News supplied its own data, and proceeded to rank the institution anyway!) The publication crunched the numbers, and the formula yielded not only an ordinal number, but also an ostensible objectivity.

In that first set of algorithmically produced rankings in 1988, public institutions—like the University of North Carolina, Berkeley, and Michigan—fell from single to double digits. Suddenly, it was the Ivy League and their kin—MIT, Duke, Chicago—that rose to the top. Also arriving on the scene for the first time were institutions like Vanderbilt, where, roughly a decade later, a combination of financial resources and rankings nearly led me to enroll.

US News found good fortune, too, from those early rankings. The publication sold nearly half a million copies of that first issue; soon, the annual rankings list sold more than two million copies. Although I don’t remember if I logged in via my dial-up AOL connection, as early as 1997 the magazine took its rankings to the web, where today illuminated faces of prospective students encounter the information. Following in the footsteps of US News, a cottage industry of college guides has joined the endeavor: from Payscale, which ranks schools according to return on investment measured in average postcollege salaries, to the Princeton Review, which uses student-reported data to characterize colleges.

The result? The emergence of what Diver designates as the “rankocracy,” nothing more than “a group of self-appointed, mostly profit-seeking journalists,” which has accrued the status of a “ruling body.” The unelected “arbiters of educational excellence in our society,” the rankocracy has attempted to bring order to what simply cannot be—or, at least, shouldn’t be—ordered.

And the sovereign’s success is all too clear. According to one study that appears in the citation-rich Breaking Ranks, students indicated that they chose to attend Colgate University over the other schools they were considering simply because of its higher ranking. Even more well-documented is the way the rankings regime influences the behavior of college leaders, with about half admitting that they actively seek to raise their institution’s status.

In September 2023, the chancellor and provost of Vanderbilt courted controversy when they lambasted recent changes to the US News algorithm, resulting in the university dropping to 18th place, five spots down from its previous ranking of 13. In an email to alumni the leaders complained that metrics that track social mobility and student debt confuse a “policy concern with measures of education quality.” “As a research university, we are particularly distressed by the lack of rigor and competence that has increasingly characterized U.S. News’ annual lists.” Readers of Breaking Ranks will find such a statement as problematic as it is predictable. As Diver tells the story of the rankings industry’s rise, the attempt to order something like a college education leads inevitably to the jockeying of positions within an overall “competitive frenzy.”

Perhaps most striking is the way this state of affairs reduces the vast postsecondary educational landscape to roughly one thousand selective schools. As the preface to Breaking Ranks points out, the other six thousand institutions—the schools that educate most students—get left behind, or below, in the college rankings game.

Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance?

History remains largely recessed in Breaking Ranks, but the late 20th-century moment in which the rankocracy consolidated its power matters. The rise of US News coincided with the Reagan-era retreat from federal government spending and the slashing of financial aid. The Pell Grant, a form of need-based aid that emerged from the 1960s-era Great Society programs, paid for less and less of the sticker price of college attendance. States, too, slashed support for public universities. Conceptually, the changes spoke to a crucial shift: college education is a private, rather than public, good.

As the 2023 Gallup polls testify, the implications of that paradigm shift ripple today. In a truly vital book What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald Daniels, with coauthors Grant Shreve and Phillip Spector, charts the grave consequences for American civic life. “I have become more and more desolate about the civic literacy of students entering our universities,” confesses Daniels, who is president of Johns Hopkins University. Entering students are “woefully undereducated in democracy’s core precepts,” he continues. “Given the perilous state of our democracy, this is an astonishing state of affairs.”

Alarming, surely—but trends in civic education make the path toward this state of the union seem less astonishing than unavoidable. Measured in dollars, the US government funds K–12 civic education at $0.15 per student (recently up from $0.05). By contrast, as of 2023, it spends $54 per student on STEM education, a field of study that is surely necessary for 21st-century life, but which studies have shown does not prepare young citizens for engagement in democracy in the way that the humanities and social sciences do.

Given this deficit at the K-12 level, higher education might endeavor to redress the imbalance. As Daniels, Shreve, and Spector reveal, however, college “curricula have abdicated responsibility for teaching the habits of democracy.” In the place of an education in and for democracy, US colleges and universities have, since the 1980s, embraced a version of civic education centered on volunteering and community service programming, which often goes under the heading of “service learning.” In one of the most trenchant insights of the book, the authors argue that the service-learning regime effectively severs civic life from political life. The problematic effect is that students learn “to engage the communities around them” but not “to engage the democratic systems through which they self-govern.”

A commitment to volunteerism certainly can coexist with democratic knowledge. Now, however, what’s needed is a collective educational effort aimed at cultivating the latter. Citizens must understand the structures that make democracy work—or not work—both to participate in everyday democratic decision-making and to contemplate efforts at democracy renovation.

A 2023 study of the civic attitudes of young adults spearheaded by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars offers an illuminating case study of the problem and the potential. Of the roughly four thousand 18-to-24-year-old Americans surveyed, only 4 percent of respondents provided correct responses to all multiple-choice-style civics questions. Among them were “Which political parties currently hold the majorities in the US Senate and US House of Representatives?” and “What is the primary purpose of the US Electoral College?” Intriguingly, survey participants who struggled to answer these civic-knowledge questions were more likely to define democracy by invoking values such as justice, equality, and fairness, whereas those who showed higher levels of civic knowledge recurred to institution- and procedure-based answers to signal what democracy is and means (elections and rule of law, for instance).

The divergence between these responses is noteworthy. Given that democracy is founded upon abstractions, justice and fairness are vital concepts, indeed. Yet, citizens also need to know how to activate such values: how to bring them to life so that people can feel and touch them, make bread and build bridges from their promise. And that kind of knowledge requires citizens to understand institutional systems, the vehicles to realize such values. As important, citizens must diagnose the ways the vehicles might need to change.

The survey revealed another pattern: respondents’ education level was not a statistically significant variable. Whether someone went to college did not impact their civic-knowledge score. The same held true for the number of civic activities they engaged in. When I first scanned the data, I thought I must be misreading it. But Dr. Jessica Sutter, at the time the chief of civic learning initiatives at the Institute, confirmed. “Frankly, we were as surprised as you are,” she remarked in an October 2023 email.

Enter the “democracy requirement.” Among the many provocative proposals that span the pages of What Universities Owe Democracy, the recommendation most deserving of further attention is the call that “every college and university … plant a stake in the ground for democratic education with a requirement ensuring that students make contact with an education tailored toward questions of democracy.” As examples, the authors point to Stanford’s Civic, Liberal, and Global Education requirement, which includes a course on 21st-century citizenship, a rethinking and revision of the aims of the Western Civ course that used to serve these purposes, and the University of Virginia’s general education curriculum focused on “engagements” with the sort of knowledge required for sustaining liberal democracy also receives mention.

Yet, in acknowledging the slow pace of change in higher education, and the curricular conflicts that invariably emerge from attempts at such change, the authors leave the “democracy requirement” mostly gestural.

Anyone who has served on a department or college curriculum committee will understand why. If instituting a democracy requirement on one college campus conjures countless faculty meetings and endless service obligations, scaling up a mandate of that kind across the higher education landscape feels even more daunting. Still, the “democracy requirement,” even as an idea, invites needed discussion of the role colleges and universities might play in recent national efforts to ask what it means to educate young people for citizenship and to forge much-needed common purpose across various national divides. The primary education system tends to take top billing in these initiatives, as in a new national effort to recenter democracy education in K–12 schools. But colleges and universities—and educational institutions of all stripes—have a part to play as well, for an education for democracy cannot end with high school graduation.

As Astra Taylor has argued, to remind ourselves of the kind of work democracy demands, we’d be better off ditching a well-worn for the less familiar, but truer, turn of phrase: What we need now to secure and ensure democracy is not “Founding Fathers” (Washington’s national university aside), but “perennial midwives.”

Within a democracy committed to seeking common knowledge as a means of securing shared happiness, colleges, in addition to primary schools, have a responsibility to educate midwives.

Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance? In its very language, Diver’s rankocracy suggests the answer is no; but the authors of What Universities Owe Democracy are more sanguine. To Daniels, Shreve, and Spector, the “competitive impulse” that Diver despises can be directed toward ends both vicious and virtuous. Where the Vanderbilt leaders lambasted the US News social mobility metric, Daniels, Shreve, and Spector argue that data point proves that rankings “can be steered toward either mobility or immobility; toward access or exclusivity; toward merit irrespective of background or the consolidation of privilege.” “It is, at least in part, a matter of design,” the authors conclude.

University of California, Riverside, Chancellor Kim Wilcox thinks that the design can be democratic. Advising university leaders to “reform” rather than “retreat” from college rankings in a recent letter, Wilcox shares how he advocated to make the US News college rankings reflect the values of a public university like Riverside, where about half of the student population is first-generation and low-income. Post–Wilcox’s intervention, Riverside’s ranking rose from 121 in 2015 to 85 in 2019. That same year the university climbed to the top of the social mobility charts. For Wilcox, the moral of the story is that “no amount of performative ‘withdrawing’ will interrupt college rankings.” Rather, the aim must be to get “fair-minded rankings that motivate universities to achieve high scores on the measures that should matter.”

Another conclusion also is clear. Although Wilcox doesn’t use the word, he narrates his leadership process like a democratic fable: from conflict to engagement and deliberation and, ultimately, change.

What might such a democratized rankocracy (a democracy?) look like from the perspective of students, the person I was nearly two decades ago, studying and trying to learn about the world of college? Near the end of Breaking Ranks, Diver maps out one such pathway. “If there were college rankings,” he writes, “they would be multiple, equally credible ones, each addressing a particular educational style or goal.” In his individualistic vision of college choice, Diver even allows for wealth-based rankings, the right “match” for those seeking “prestige.” Rankings for those who seek “racial and ethnic diversity” in their educational experience would be available, too. The point is to allow “prospective college students” to “approach the choice of where to apply as an exercise in personal discovery and fulfillment.”

Yet that proposal does not wholly harmonize with Diver’s goal of democratizing college education—or, as he terms it, “of achieving social and racial justice.” That Diver chooses to name his most ambitious aims not by invoking democracy but rather in value terms is noteworthy considering the findings of the 2023 Citizens & Scholars survey, where young people articulated the meaning of democracy not by identifying procedures of institutions, the domain of civic knowledge, but by way of values. Clearly racial justice is a democratic value as well as a necessary design feature of democracy. And yet, that democratic value still awaits its vehicle; as the brilliant democratic thinker Danielle Allen reminds us, “The world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality, and economies that empower all have been achieved.”

Creating such an order requires an understanding, first, of why racial justice matters in and to democratic systems, and, second, of how we can design such systems to achieve just ends across racial difference. It will require us, in other words, to name democracy as a goal and value in and of itself.

That Diver does not do so, despite what are his clear democratic intentions, speaks to the broader silence about democracy that marks contemporary public discourse as much as the classrooms of the academy. It is a truism that the college campus is the most diverse community students will be part of—perhaps their first, and last, such experience. Yet it is also the case that, as Daniels, Shreve, and Spector remind us, bringing a diverse group of people together in one space matters little if genuine “encounters” across this diversity do not occur.

Today, the students and faculty who compose the higher education landscape largely live in that same world, where the organizing work of race- and gender-based movements capture more attention than, say, matters of who controls Congress, or the last time we amended the Constitution. But as the authors of What Universities Owe Democracy as well as emerging initiatives to recenter the college curriculum on civic learning suggest, opportunities abound to connect the aims of those movements with democratic systems and structures that facilitate the ends of justice they seek, if faculty, students, and parents are willing to place civic participation at the heart of a college education. Such a shift may even invite dialogue with more skeptical Americans, young and old, who wonder about the values of such activism in a system founded on the promise of representation.

What, and whom, is college for?

And maybe, if rightly designed, college rankings can help, not hurt, in the effort. Even if Diver’s vision of college rankings as part of a student’s journey toward “personal discovery and fulfillment” misses something crucial, it provides a partial starting point. For democracy matters precisely because that system of government is the best way to secure human flourishing. As Allen has recently argued in a major work of political philosophy, Justice by Means of Democracy, the task of 21st-century citizenship is to find ways to bring that promise of flourishing to life, not for the few but for the many.

That work begins, Allen contends, with “authentic and equitable” citizens, people who are “clear about what matters to them and why.” After all, the entire “point of civic and political engagement simply is the pursuit of one’s purposes.” But democracy can’t stop there—doing so only leaves us, at best, with the student who browses the US News rankings looking for the college that gets them closer to their own goals, whether they be wealth accumulation, a particular vocation, or commitment to a cause.

By contrast, a democratically attuned ranking would take the next step of connecting one’s own “purposes with those of others.” For Allen, this “relational challenge” of democracy is what civic education must cultivate. For it requires us to reveal—and seek after—our own aims, while also learning about the aims of others—learning, that is, how an individual exists alongside, in concert and in tension, with other citizens, who also have aims and aspirations.

Twenty years have passed from the time when my parents and I consulted the latest college guides. I can’t recall if we read the fine print, or if disclaimers about how best to use that information even existed then. Now, at least, US News openly admits the “controversial” nature of rankings; on its webpage, the publication offers advice that, at the end of the day, does not differ radically from Diver’s:

• Use the rankings as a tool to select and compare schools.

• Use the search and sort capabilities of the rankings to learn more about different types of schools.

• Think long and hard about the right place for you and choose carefully.

• Don’t wait until the last minute. College matters.

• Don’t rely solely on rankings as the basis for choosing a college.

The do-and-don’t list boils down to one principle: “Students should gather information on colleges in a number of ways,” and then decide what is “right” for them.

But following Allen, and the larger movement to make college campuses more democratic spaces, we should work to add another principle: Do find a college, no matter its kind or rank, that will prepare you to participate in democratic citizenship, for that aim is, or should be, the primary purpose of higher education.

I don’t know how I would have responded to that kind of admonition two decades ago. Rankings, as well as financial aid, ultimately led me not to Vanderbilt—whose Southern campus, gorgeous though it was, seemed too strange a world—but to Notre Dame, whose Princeton Review–endorsed status as “jock school” gave my marching-band-made frame pause.

Looking back, I can’t remember now if the idea of democracy was even on my mind as I sorted through the college guides stacked in my bedroom closet. That concern came into focus later, through college coursework on the narratives of American democracy in an English class, and through a philosophy course on poverty and justice, where I sat next to a Peace Studies major whose hat promoted a (to me) unknown Illinois politician: Obama for Senate. The commitment congealed, too, in a first-year discussion group on diversity, run by the physical education department, where I learned that in a school where everyone claimed to be “middle class,” the average income of a Notre Dame student’s family circled around six figures.

None of those courses was a democracy requirement. But they clarified for me the aims of higher education. Ranked far above, and before, any careerist or economic incentives was the enterprise of coming to a sense of self by way of real and imagined encounters with people and ideas. Those encounters made me examine my own ideas and commitments, enlarging the only world I had known up to that point in my life.

That’s an opportunity that every college student should have, and it’s one that higher education collectively ought to embrace, and work to extend, to all students with urgency in the 21st century.