The Last Mile Problem - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 11

In short, these factors have brought data fluency to the masses. Millions of
fans have learned how to read charts, grasp basic data concepts, and allow
deeply embedded data to inform how they make decisions—all critical skills
associated with quadrant one in our framework.
Producers of Data Products: u.S. News
The president of a prestigious nationally ranked university waited for the news.
Ranked #20 in the previous year in U.S. News & World Report's Best College
list, she felt enormous pressure from its large and influential alumni base to
stay in the top 20. Though prepared to say that rankings didn't matter, she
couldn't help but think about how she spent the past year touting its entry
into the top 20 at every major fundraising and recruiting event. Not too far
away from her office, high school seniors from the city's best school would
use the rankings to guide their college selection.
The stakes are high. Economists James Monks and Ronald Ehrenberg found
that a negative change in rankings would result in a decrease in applications, a
decrease in applicant quality, and a drop in fundraising among select colleges
and universities (Monks and Ehrenberg, 1999) 11 . A recent study further found
that moving to the front page of the U.S. News ranking provides a significant
increase in enrollment across all institution types (Bowman and Bastedo, 2009) 12 .
Yet these rankings are controversial. Critics argue that the rankings show
little variation across years—a measure that favors those who are consistently
on top, institutions like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and a handful of other
prestigious schools. Proponents, however, contend that the rankings help
standardized college reporting and open visibility to the public with respect
to financial data, teacher quality, student satisfaction and a host of other vari-
ables. Deciding where to apply and attend from approximately 2,400 public
and private 4-year colleges is no easy decision.
Despite the controversy over the rankings, popular interest in the list has grown.
For example, every September when U.S. News releases its Best Colleges list,
the USNews.com website experiences massive volumes of visitors. In 2013,
2.6 million unique visitors generated almost 19 million views in a single day
around the release of the rankings. 13 The online interest suggests people find
the rankings to be an incredibly useful tool to sift through the vast amount of
information available from colleges—information that is presented differently
by each institution—to help guide college choice decisions.