HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U.S. News, Department Of Education, And Law Schools Take The Gloves Off In Rankings Battle.

The real objection to the rankings is that they make it harder to discriminate on the basis of race, and they want to discriminate on the basis of race. There are legitimate concerns with the rankings, but that’s what’s driving this.

Meanwhile, U.S. News is fighting back by asking the Secretary of Education “to demand that all schools – including elite law schools – provide open access to all of their undergraduate and graduate school data, using a common data set. This would enable prospective students and their families to make meaningful comparisons between institutions, based on factors such as financial information, admissions data, and outcome statistics, including employment rates at graduation.”

That’s fair. These schools, whether public or private, sit atop a geyser of public funding. They wouldn’t exist in their current form without it.