Equality of Opportunity and Antitrust: The Curious Case of College Rankings

Abstract

Rankings increasingly dominate our world. We use them to choose just about everything—from which pizza or ice cream to buy, to which doctors to trust with our health, to which universities to trust with our intellectual growth and flourishing. But should we trust them? Taking popular academic rankings as an example, such as the U.S. News rankings, this article contends not necessarily, for several reasons. First, because as this article argues, the U.S. News rankings may mislead rather than inform consumers. Second, by fueling a prestige battle between universities, the U.S. News rankings incentivize universities to harm cultural and economic diversity—important facets of educational quality. These conclusions, critical in their own right, raise additional important but underexplored questions for antitrust law. Should universities be allowed to boycott the U.S. News rankings so that they can free themselves of the prestige battle in which they participate? Can an “antirankings boycott” be justified by antitrust law on the basis that it may allow universities to promote diversity and increase access to the underserved? Although these questions are not easy to address, they are at the heart of this article.