Everybody hates the US News & World report rankings of colleges. Does anyone even read that magazine anymore? And yet, many Americans who don't work in higer education still consider it the authoritative "ranking" of colleges.

I used to think college rankings were silly intellectual fraud. That is the scientists's view: are we being honest with ourselves? Does the data support the model? Not really. But I learned two things thinking about it.

The first: the need for psychological safety is real. Americans don't routinely put down a quarter-million dollars on intangible goods like education; when they do, they want to know they're making a good decision. So US News is really selling the same thing as a financial advisor: certainty. "If you do this, even though it seems crazy and risky, you'll get a good outcome". A lot of professional services sell this, too: spend a ton of money, but it's OK, because we've done this sort of thing before, we're good at it, and you won't lose everything.

The other thing: I think we're going to have an intellectual shift in how we think about "fit" over the coming decades: less "the best", more "the best for you". It's already starting in precision medicine, where new drugs are targeting thin slices of the population, acknowledging that something as complex as drug delivery might need to consider the characteristics of an individual, rather than assuming every human is identical.

Maybe US News & World report will eventually develop an interactive tool that lets each person build their own ranking. But I wouldn't be so sure, because humans also love to compare, and university education has a big status component to it, too.

It's not greed that drives the world, but envy - Charlie Munger