The 2012 US News rankings are already out! Of course, those in the know realize that USN is on a different calendar than the rest of us and today's news is about the release of the 2013 rankings. For those of you desperate to know how your favorite law school, b-school or grad school has been re-evaluated by Robert Morse and the staff of US News, your day has finally come.
To the editors' credit, the annual rankings issue has at least one high value attribute: it aggregates lots of numerical information in one place. As for the editors' ordinal rankings? We can already count on the usual cross-fire. Most academics hate them. A remarkable number of student bloggers treat them as gospel. And more than anything, they drive traffic to the rankings company formerly known as a news magazine. Compared to his dicey investment in the New York Daily News, this has got to be a Mort Zuckerman cash cow.
But enough of the back and forth on the value of USN. Sit back, grab a beer and some hot wings and watch the clock.
Rankings are due out at midnight. But count on the annual leak sometime before that.