In 1934, Edwin Embree made an informal list of “the dozen greatest universities in America.” As he related in The Atlantic the following year, “A storm at once broke over my temerarious head.” An unnamed politician responded with curses and threats over the exclusion of his state’s university on the list. The unranked institutions demanded to be ranked and threatened libel suits. The highly ranked wished to be ranked higher. An eager swarm of “pupils and their mothers” clamored to know what college to attend. Only the Harvard people, whose institution Embree ranked first, were happy.
Embree, a foundation executive who had worked in higher education, wrote his Atlantic article “In Order of Their Eminence: An Appraisal of American Universities” as a less temerarious (an eminent-sounding word for “reckless”) and more “authoritative” exercise. University rankings might be “unusual,” Embree noted, but they were a matter of systematic study, not “personal opinion.” His list ran to just 11 universities that met his definition of “eminence” (though he did list six others that were nearly eminent).
Embree and The Atlantic had stumbled upon the formula for a publishing juggernaut. Although the magazine has never since published university rankings, the factors that amplified the reception of Embree’s findings—institutions’ anxiety, consumer demand, and the appeal of controversy—have driven the popularity of its modern successor, the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, which released its most recent list last week.
College rankings have shaped much public discussion and perception of America’s higher education over the past four decades, yet it took nearly half a century after Embree’s list went public for the U.S. News version to emerge. In that interim period, lists would surface periodically, but they were more a curiosity (or an invitation to quarrel) than a cultural staple. By the 1980s, however, college had become a mass-consumer good, and rankings became a vital map of the American meritocracy.
Prior to Embree’s article, the history of college rankings was generally the history of the controversies that came with them. In 1911, Kendric Babcock, a former university president working for the Bureau of Education, set out to classify the quality of undergraduate education at hundreds of institutions. His study was anything but temerarious. The product of two years of work, it was sober, statistical, and meant only for administrators who wanted a sense of which colleges prepared students best for graduate work. Yet when the results leaked—placing 344 schools into four tiers—a storm broke about Babcock’s head too. Catholic institutions were excluded from the top ranks; Syracuse’s chancellor protested until his university was moved into the top tier; some alumni were offended to learn that they hadn’t attended first-rate institutions.