Colin Diver has never really liked the U.S. News and World Report's ranking system

for colleges and universities, but at least he's come to this opinion honestly.

Well, I was dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1989 to 1999, and in my second

year as dean, U.S. News started its regular annual law school rankings.

Colin says he dreaded the ranking stance each year. First off, it was a lot of work.

He had to answer hundreds of questions about grades and test scores for incoming applicants,

and then about their salaries once they got out. Then he had to do something called

a peer review, where he gave his own personal opinion about 190 different law schools.

I had not even heard of many of those law schools. You know, what we were induced to do

by the desire to improve our rankings is put ourselves in the top quintile

and put our close competitors in the bottom quintile, and I knew everybody else would do that.

Hold it really? Because I was going to ask, did you ever consider going totally rogue,

like ranking Harvard at the bottom of the pack just for fun?

Oh yeah, no, at first I did that, just for fun. But then I noticed that the form that they sent me

had a number printed in the lower left-hand corner. When identifier?

Yeah, that was the way they would know to disqualify most of my responses.

But at some point I just gave up filling that form out altogether.

It sounds like you just had like one problem after another with how the rankings were decided.

And I know eventually you left Penn for Reed College, a school that had shunned college rankings entirely,

and you've described how freeing that was.

But when you spoke to your old colleagues and urged them to ditch the US news rankings,

like join me, be free. What did they say?

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