Should Schools Opt Out of Rankings?

Maclean's Magazine is out with its 2006 University Rankings issue covering 42 Canadian colleges and universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that over two dozen schools boycotted the magazine's questionnaire and refused to provide performance-indicator information as they had for the prior 15 years because of concerns over the magazine's methodology. In our Moneyball article (What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Tex. L. Rev. 1483 (2004)), Rafael Gely and I are are skeptical about schools' attempts to opt out of rankings without offering an alternative to the public:

In our view, law schools are faced with a clear choice. We can continue resisting public demands for accountability and transparency through rankings. But such resistance is futile, as a market that demands rankings of brain surgeons and heart-transplant programs will not accept protestations from the legal academy that what we do is simply too special to be evaluated with objective measures.

For more details, see here and here.