There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about college rankings of any kind (except when they put UMBC at the top of the list, of course). Rankings are only as good as the factors that determine them. For example, some college rankings rely on the selectivity of the admissions process as a gauge of quality. That's true of Kiplinger's just-published list of its 100 Best Values in Public Colleges 2009-2010, which ranks UMBC at #93 (and UMCP at #8). Admissions selectivity tells you something about the preparation of the entering class, but very little about the quality of students' learning experiences once they are on campus.

What promises to be helpful to UMBC about these flawed ranking systems is that they can create positive feedback loops: a boost in one ranking can improve a university's outcomes for the factors that determine other rankings. We are likely to benefit from such a feedback loop in the next few years, following UMBC's extremely impressive rankings in this year's U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges Guide. Applications to UMBC for fall 2010 are way up, probably because of the favorable attention generated by the U.S. News rankings. Assuming UMBC does not admit astronomically more students for fall 2010 than it did for 2009, our selectivity is about to increase. And that will boost UMBC among the 'best values' in future Kiplinger rankings, as well as other college rankings. And that, in turn, will boost UMBC's outcomes for the factors that determine still others' rankings . . . and so on.