Harvard Medical School’s decision to withdraw from US News & World Report’s rankings — on which it previously held the No. 1 slot — is lamentable, though not because the system is flawless or even notably good.
There have long been valid criticisms of college and university evaluations from Left and Right, and for an array of micro-issues entirely unrelated to ideology. Apart from anything else, rankings incentivize schools to game the system instead of focusing on real education .
But Harvard’s move is still a problem, for it fits a pattern of schools hiding achievement, which is a process that shades quickly into relegating merit. Harvard Law School also dropped out of the rankings recently, following Yale Law School, and then many other high-caliber schools fell into line and dropped out, too. Expect more.
However reasonable any particular criticism of a ranking system may be, there should be real concern about the fact that objective merit itself is being discarded. Where once a few disquieting straws became apparent in the egalitarian wind, there is now a gale blowing, and a bonfire of reliable standards is raging.
In place of measurable achievement, schools are emphasizing subjective qualities and adopting criteria for admissions and awards that give free rein to the prejudices of their overwhelmingly left-wing administrators and academic faculty.
The withdrawal of top universities from ranking systems is connected to a scandal that has exploded in Virginia , where high schools that were once proudly the best in America have hidden National Merit awards from their own students.
It is probably a stretch by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin to call this a “human rights violation,” but his outrage is understandable, and he is right to hound out the ugly truth of this effort to bury high achievement. It is apparently systematic and coordinated.
Several Virginia schools failed to tell students they’d received commendations from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. They thus denied the children in their care an accolade that would burnish resumes for college admission. Some schools sought to excuse themselves, saying they’d made an unintentional error, but this is falsified by at least one that the omission was deliberate and intended to avoid hurt feeling among students who failed to get a commendation.
Brandon Kotaska, the ironically titled director of student services at one school, told a complaining parent he wanted “to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” William McGurn reported in the Wall Street Journal.
Youngkin told the Washington Examiner , “This overarching effort for equal outcomes is hurting Virginia children and their future.”
So, top medical schools don’t want to be ranked even (or especially) when they are the best, and top high schools don’t want their pupils commended for good work. But that is not all. Colleges are also abandoning test scores as a means of assessing whether an applicant is suitable for admission. They don’t want objective measures anymore.
An email in my possession from a high school counselor tells the parents of rising seniors that only 4% of Common App schools now require test scores. It warns parents who went to college in the 1980s and 1990s that they must “forget all that you think you know” because college is no longer what it was in their day.
Colleges are seizing on “holistic admissions” unrelated to excellence, academic achievement, or other traditional markers of intellect, knowledge, and application. Shape-shifting and amorphous criteria allow admissions staff to play favorites — for example, between applicants’ races and political beliefs.
Affirmative action is the best example of this. Concerned more with diversity and equity than with educational excellence, schools across the country demote high-achieving students of certain races in the admissions process to elevate other less-represented groups. In a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, plaintiffs argued Harvard University deliberately gave Asian-American students poor marks on the “personality” part of the application to avoid having to admit them to the school, even though they outperformed most other applicants academically.
All these examples — the medical schools and law schools, the hidden commendations, the abandonment of test scores — reveal a move by the education establishment to reject competition and equalize outcomes irrespective of merit.
Sooner or later, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. As examples mount of achievement being disregarded and effort being deprecated, it is clear that this is not haphazard change dictated by the whims of chance. It is, rather, systematic, to use a word favored by the Left.
Radical equalization is at the heart of the Left’s agenda — in education, the world of work, and throughout our culture. If you are a terrible teacher or an incompetent bureaucrat, never mind, you’ll be treated no differently than an inspiring classroom mentor or a dedicated civil servant. Post-modern socialism is all about eradicating the distinctions between things done well and things done badly.
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In the Left’s merit-less society, there’s no difference between excellence and incompetence
