How to think critically about polls and rankings

Ever since The Harvard Business Review declared data science to be “the sexiest job of the 21st century” in 2012, I feel like I have been promoted. I used to be a statistician, with a PhD and a professorship at a major university. This almost guaranteed glazed eyes and short conversations at social events. Now I’m a data scientist!

Permit me to use my new status to express some skepticism, particularly when it comes to rankings and polls. As a consumer of information, I can tell you they play right into our insatiable need to order entities. As a scientist, I can tell you their methods often are flawed and are easily subject to manipulation, making them highly fallible representations of reality.

Take, for example, university rankings. Should a top-notch student prefer Columbia over Stanford? In the latest US News and World Report’s National University Rankings, Columbia (#3) bested Stanford (#6). But in the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings of US schools, Stanford (#1) destroyed Columbia (#12). How can an 18-year-old make sense of this? (And even if they could, how would they now begin to factor in the effects of the pandemic on each campus and on their classes?)

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