Unfounded rankings systems are all the rage now. I love it on yahoo news Stockton was ranked the worst city in America by god knows who, but somebody somewhere said Stockton was the worst city. People will go with it. A truly amazing thing has come out in high school basketball, which just shows how ridiclous rankings in our country and probably every in the world has become. Maxpreps.com Look at this site and find your high school wherever you went has been ranked in every sport from 1-20,000. According to some organization that doesn't even publish a formula. It is ridiculous in my high school conference there are teams rated 34 in the country 1,429, 800, 6,204, and 3,249, the team that is 34th in the country is awesome the other ones are interchangeable on any given day one beats the other and it happened. As truly sad as it is I have had family friends call and ask me if they should transfer their kid from high school x ranked 2,432 to high school x ranked 1,729.
According to the post about judging restaurants based on arbitrary unfounded rankings that exists as well. Restaurants are Zagat rated what the hell does that mean it is a stamp that almost every restaurant in San Francisco or New York seems to have I have not lived anywhere else recently, but Zagat some organization somewhere saying this is good comes up with a ranking.
The whole ranking system in our culture makes absolutely no sense. In California everyone was saying we ranked 43rd in the state education and America is something like 28th internationally for education again who the hell is coming up with this and more importantly how are they coming up with them??? Journalists just go with someone saying that person was 29th best and assume it is true.
That is a complete and basically incoherent rant on how rankings just come out of nowhere and basically based on nothing in all aspects of life and should not be taken seriously. Since this is a law school discussion board when choosing your school use something called common sense, which I almost did not use and ended up in Michigan. Harvard is a great school, Yale is a great school, Stanford is a great school. If you think anyone is going to respect Michigan State over Chapman because some organization said Michigan State was 89th while Chapman was 93rd then you are probably mistaken. I am sure someone out there would take it seriously, but it probably would not be a good idea.