Episode Details

The Ivy League isn't an academic honor society — it's an eight-school athletic conference founded in 1954, named for the ivy on old campus buildings. Yet we treat that football schedule as shorthand for academic excellence. This episode traces the surprisingly short history of global university rankings (the Shanghai ranking and QS both launched in the early 2000s), digs into what they actually measure, and asks whether a single number can ever capture what a university is. From Nobel-count-heavy methodologies to reputation surveys that just ask academics what they already think, we explore the seven deadly sins of rankings, the cascade effect that locks in prestige, and what happened when Yale, Harvard, and Columbia walked away from the U.S. News law school rankings in 2022. Episode #447828 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/447828