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To Rank or Not to Rank? A Conversation With Amit Mrig, Founder and CEO of Academic Impressions

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Welcome back! It has been a long summer… and the academic year once again is in full apogee. This pundit took the last two months off from blogging as I transitioned away from the university presidency.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Amit Mrig, founder and CEO of Academic Impressions, an organization which, for more than a decade, has been providing higher education professionals with practical, experience-based tools and information to help them succeed in an increasingly challenging fiscal, cultural, technological, political, and academic environment.
Our conversation was wide ranging and stimulating — Amit is a passionate advocate for improving higher education in the U.S., and ensuring access and success to the widest possible student population — as am I.

Part of our conversation centered on the (then) upcoming rankings to be provided by the federal government and the increasing emphasis on the use of rankings by many consumers. And so we asked – Are these rankings fair or are they biased? Are they an accurate measure of the value of a university? How about the quality of an education? And we concluded, emphatically, “No.”

To understand why we responded this way we should consider a few facts, and three important issues facing higher education today.


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Ricardo Azziz, MD, MPH, MBA

A educator-scientist-executive with over 20 years of leadership experience in higher education, research, and healthcare, Dr. Azziz currently serves as Regents’ Professor, Augusta University; Senior Fellow, American Association of State Colleges & Universities; Visiting Scholar, Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California; and former founding CEO, Georgia Regents Health System.