This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.In 1934, Edwin Embree made an informal list of “the dozen greatest universities in America.” As he related in The Atlantic the following year, “A storm at once broke over my temerarious head.” An unnamed politician responded with curses and threats over the exclusion of his state’s university on the list. The unranked institutions demanded to be ranked and threatened libel suits. The highly ranked wished to be ranked higher. An eager swarm of “pupils and their mothers” clamored to know what college to attend. Only the Harvard people, whose institution Embree ranked first, were happy.Embree, a foundation executive who had worked in higher education, wrote his Atlantic article “In Order of Their Eminence: An Appraisal of American Universities” as a less temerarious (an eminent-sounding word for “reckless”) and more “authoritative” exercise. University rankings might be “unusual,” Embree noted, but they were a matter of systematic study, not “personal opinion.” His list ran to just 11 universities that met his definition of “eminence” (though he did list six others that were nearly eminent).Embree and The Atlantic had stumbled upon the formula for a publishing juggernaut. Although the magazine has never since published university rankings, the factors that amplified the reception of Embree’s findings—institutions’ anxiety, consumer demand, and the appeal of controversy—have driven the popularity of its modern successor, the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, which released its most recent list last week.College rankings have shaped much public discussion and perception of America’s higher education over the past four decades, yet it took nearly half a century after Embree’s list went public for the U.S. News version to emerge. In that interim period, lists would surface periodically, but they were more a curiosity (or an invitation to quarrel) than a cultural staple. By the 1980s, however, college had become a mass-consumer good, and rankings became a vital map of the American meritocracy.Prior to Embree’s article, the history of college rankings was generally the history of the controversies that came with them. In 1911, Kendric Babcock, a former university president working for the Bureau of Education, set out to classify the quality of undergraduate education at hundreds of institutions. His study was anything but temerarious. The product of two years of work, it was sober, statistical, and meant only for administrators who wanted a sense of which colleges prepared students best for graduate work. Yet when the results leaked—placing 344 schools into four tiers—a storm broke about Babcock’s head too. Catholic institutions were excluded from the top ranks; Syracuse’s chancellor protested until his university was moved into the top tier; some alumni were offended to learn that they hadn’t attended first-rate institutions. Very quickly, the Bureau of Education suppressed the report, and anyone wishing to see it was furnished instead with a 12-page apology from its chief, Philander P. Claxton. Early in 1913, President William Howard Taft issued an executive order halting any further federal reports on college rankings. A chastened federal-education administrator reflected that the Bureau of Education had “learned that there are no second and third and fourth class colleges.”Subsequent lists trod lightly, taking crude measures such as tabulating the number of alumni listed in Who’s Who in America or ranking individual graduate departments. Building on this work, Embree was careful to note that he was not focusing on the quality of undergraduate education; rather, he was ranking universities holistically based on faculty publication rates, reputational surveys in different fields, and the number of notable faculty members. Although not included in his tabulations, endowments and less quantifiable measures, such as status, were also taken into account in his analysis. (“A degree from Harvard,” he wrote, “carries social as well as scholastic distinction.”)Yet Embree’s list and commentary reflected a world in which university life was still overwhelmingly the privileged preserve of white, Protestant men, and in which scholarly “eminence” was less an objective measure than a set of tastes and preferences. Although Embree was himself something of an outsider—he had attended Berea College in Kentucky before going to Yale for graduate work—his commentary carried the whiff of the rarefied circles in which he moved. For all of his show of rigor and method, Embree’s “eminence” revealed less about universities themselves than about the prejudices of the society they served.Embree’s rankings appeared as the ground under elite higher education was shifting. Already by the 1930s, the children of immigrants—particularly urban Jews—were challenging elite admissions offices with unassailable high-school records and SAT scores (one of them, a Brooklynite named Stanley Kaplan, would make a fortune creating the test-prep industry). The Ivies responded by elevating “character”—the personal essay, the interview, the cult of the “well-rounded” applicant—as a way to preserve old boundaries. But they could not do so for long. After World War II and the passage of the GI Bill, enrollments swelled more broadly, and attending an institution of higher education became an ever more common aspiration.Noting the novel conditions, Chesly Manly of the Chicago Tribune ventured a ranking of his own in 1957—the first, he noted, since Embree’s was published two decades earlier. Unlike Embree, though, Manly focused on undergraduate education. Combining statistical information, a reputational survey administered to 33 scholars, and his own observations, Manly offered top- 10 lists for universities and three categories of small colleges. It was the first time, he claimed, that a mass publication had synthesized so much data to produce such rankings. Still, as Manly himself pointed out, his list was “virtually unchanged” from Embree’s; the dominance of Harvard, whose “reputation is a synonym for all that is fine in education,” was “unchallengeable.”Manly’s list attracted wide notice, and a bit of controversy. But like Embree’s, it was a one-off. A few public institutions made Manly’s top 10—UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin—but the Ivy League and private schools that topped the list remained clubby domains that catered to their traditional clientele by selecting for intangible qualities, such as “character,” over academic excellence. As late as 1950, Yale’s acceptance rate was 46 percent. By 1968, the acceptance rates at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had fallen to around 20 percent, as the schools placed greater emphasis on high GPAs and test scores. The higher-education landscape we know now—Ivy League acceptance rates in the single digits, exorbitantly expensive test prep, private consultants—began to take shape not long after.By 1983, U.S. News’s editors found fertile ground for their new experiment. A November issue from that year listed America’s “Best Colleges” based solely on a reputational survey of college presidents, roughly 60 percent of whom actually answered the questions. Stanford came in at No. 1, Harvard at No. 2, prompting officials there to “question the validity of the data.” The experiment was halting at first—U.S. News did not make the list annual until 1988—but already, the implications were clear: For students and their families, the rankings mattered in a world in which college-admissions officers appeared to determine destinies.U.S. News’s methods have evolved over time, reducing the weight of reputational surveys and adding inputs such as test scores, faculty-student ratios, and graduation and retention rates. Although some institutions have fought back against the rankings, others have worked to game them, tailoring their numbers to the metrics: soliciting more applications to drive down acceptance rates, massaging class sizes, and, in some cases, even misreporting data.U.S. News searches for the “best,” and Embree measured colleges based on “eminence.” Yet the difference is more rhetorical than real. The top of the list has remained stubbornly familiar, and the echoes of Embree’s experiment have done less to change the order than to naturalize it, cloaking fixed notions of prestige in the language of data. Rankings became an annual ritual, a franchise powerful enough to bend institutions toward its numbers and drive striving students into ever-greater frenzies. Ranking colleges once seemed temerarious for a reason. Decades later, perhaps it still is.