HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Higher Education’s Sea Change. “Enrollment is down, longstanding traditions are crumbling and applicant pools are changing dramatically. . . . It suggests that there’s a broader question about the value of college and particularly concerns about student debt and paying for college and potential labor market returns.”

If only there had been some sort of warning.

Plus:

Columbia University fell 16 places on the ranking list earlier this year, to a spot last seen in 1988, in a dramatic shakeup that may have punctured perceptions of the decades-old list.

“That brought a lot more national attention to the weaknesses, the flaws, the foibles in the ranking system,” Colin Diver, former president of Reed College, which does not participate in the rankings, told Axios after Columbia’s fall.

Note that if an Ivy League school plummets, the problem must be with the rankings and not with the school. While Columbia’s fall doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem with the rankings, Diver’s take does cast doubt on how they’re received — the rankings are apparently useful only to the extent they reinforce existing prejudices about which schools are better.