The Wrong People Are Doing the Ranking

The credential cartel is thriving. Our students? Not so much.

Business schools love to flex their “Top 10” status like it means something. But: it doesn’t. These rankings are handed out by credential parasites—middlemen who make a living charging universities to exist. Accreditation agencies, journal editors, citation mafias… it’s all one incestuous ecosystem of PhDs ranking other PhDs to justify their own salaries.

It’s prestige inflation with a paywall. If rankings actually reflected quality, companies wouldn’t just be browsing glossy brochures—they’d be paying for early access. That’s what happens at Y Combinator. Not at Harvard. Exactly.

So here’s the question: Why aren’t companies doing the rankings? That would flip the whole damn system. Imagine a public leaderboard showing what grads look like six months in, one year in—who’s thriving, who’s treading water, and who’s just slick enough to land the job but clueless enough to tank the team.

And in a world where AI puts unfathomable knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, labels are increasingly useless—they’re backwards-looking. Accreditation, like an earnings report, tells you what was—not what is. The prestige used to come from what schools had: libraries, journals, deep pools of expertise. But when research that once took weeks now takes minutes, the value isn’t in access—it’s in direction. What matters is how institutions train students to think, to frame the right problems, to build what matters. Not faster. Smarter. AI hasn’t killed education—it’s exposed what was hollow in the first place.

Want a better signal? Alumni perceptions of relevance are 2–3x better predictors of actual value than all the current ranking metrics combined (NYT).

The whole point is: if we’re not listening to the people who hire or live the outcome, we’re just swapping badges at an academic costume party.

Here’s what I’m doing: I ask every former student to send me a “1-Year Report.” What helped. What didn’t. What was complete bullshit. No spin. Just receipts. And I don’t just file them away—I use them. Every year, I tear out and rebuild around 40% of my course content based on what actually held up in the real world. I even hear from some of their managers—the end customer. They don’t give a damn about my diplomas or past job titles. They don’t ask about accreditations or publications. They just want to know: did this person show up ready to solve real problems, or did they arrive dressed for the role with nothing under the costume?

That’s the test. That’s what schools should be doing. If you're still hiding behind credentials in a world flooded with instant knowledge, you're not educating—you’re cosplaying.