In the Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of  the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell published an essay on the folly of academic rankings: “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us.” Gladwell’s essay is worth reading in the light of Poets & Writers’ new issue, “MFA Nation.” The issue contains  the annual rankings of writing programs. As Gladwell argues (and Robert M. Pirsig dramatized before him in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), quality is a very difficult thing to measure. Inevitably, one must resort to quantifying proxies of quality to measure quality, but that’s hardly the same as measuring quality itself. The tables of Poets & Writers contain proxies galore.

Our members may have already exhausted discussions of the problems in ranking MFA programs in the blogosphere, but it’s worth reviewing a few specific defects in Poets & Writers’ rankings. Although Gladwell does not discuss writing programs in his essay, it’s fun to apply his insights to the nonsense inherent in ranking our programs.

The engineer of the MFA rankings, Seth Abramson explains his methodology on the magazine’s website. In that explanation, if you can persevere to read far enough, you will discover that one of the proxies Abramson uses for quality is a tabulation of the programs’ vote-getting, or the popularity of programs among the visitors to his own website and another website. Any statistician will tell you that, for a sample to reflect any bigger reality with any accuracy, that sample must be randomly selected; the survey sample may not be self-selecting, like the group that chose to visit a certain website. After all, that self-selection can skew the results mightily. Abramson supplants the good surveyor’s Central Limit Theorem with a cluster-muck of misused proxies. (The clatter of keyboards you now hear is the desperation of low-ranked programs sending impostor-students to blog on Abramson’s website.)

Another proxy for quality that may mislead prospective students is Abramson’s scoring of “funding.” A program that admits only seven students a year and provides financial support for all of them will score more highly than a program that admits thirty students a year, but provides financial support for half of them. Where is a prospective student most likely to win both acceptance and full funding? Where should the prospective student apply? At the elite institution that matriculates only seven students, or the public university that admits thirty but funds twice as many students than the more elite institution? As Gladwell argues, the business of academic rankings favors schools like Yale because the rankings are designed to favor Yale-ness. Providing affordable education to the largest portion of the public is not something for which many rankings have good proxies.

The most bizarre aspect of Poets & Writers’ rankings and Abramson’s malgorithms remains the fact that those casting the votes are not people who have actually studied or taught in those programs. The voters are prospective students who have only examined the programs’ promotional materials; the voters do not have first-hand experience of studying within them. This is like judging the sea-worthiness of a ship by your fondness for the color of its sails, or it’s like reviewing a book by the claims of its blurbs, or it’s like choosing a wine by whether or not the bottle has an endearing animal logo on its label, etc. Marketing is the art of persuading people to mistake proxies of quality for quality itself. Rankings are the awful children of that devious art.

If you are planning to attend a program, AWP recommends that you consider the quality of the faculty members at your prospective programs first foremost. (There's no proxy or measure for the quality of faculty in Poets & Writers' asinine rankings. This is something you will have to measure yourself. It's an artistic choice among the many artistic choices you must make in your education as a writer.) Please see "On Choosing the Writing Program Best for You"  and our guide to writing programs, available on our website.