A weighted composite is an opinion

How rankings are actually made.

A printed league table page with rows highlighted — A league table publishes an integer. The weights that produced it are published too, in a document almost nobody reads.Photograph for Directory of Education

A ranking is a set of chosen indicators, each multiplied by a chosen weight and summed into a single number. The weights are the editorial position, and they are published. These pages read the methodology rather than the table — what a reputation survey can and cannot separate, which indicators actually move a position, and how distance study came to be counted at all.

The pages in this section

04.1A weighted composite is an editorial position
Every ranking is a set of chosen indicators with chosen weights, and the weights are the argument.
04.2What a reputation survey measures
Peer-assessment scores are substantially autocorrelated with previous rankings, which is documented.
04.3The indicators that actually move a position
Small changes in a heavily weighted input produce large movements, which is why positions are unstable at the margin.
04.4Online delivery, and what the accreditors decided counted
Correspondence courses, the Open University's 1969 charter and the decisions that made distance study creditable.

The other three parts

The hour as a container

The Carnegie unit, and the degree assembled from it.

Who says a degree counts

Accreditation as a private function.

Thirty thousand acres a seat

The Morrill Acts and what they built.