Mel Elfin, Newsman Who Built up College Ranking Guide, Dies at 89

Mel Elfin, a longtime Washington bureau chief for Newsweek who moved to the rival U.S. News & World Report in 1986 and helped build its college rankings feature into a major educational franchise, died Saturday in Washington. He was 89.

His son, David, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.

For Elfin, overseeing U.S. News’ college rankings posed a challenge that differed from working at Newsweek, where he covered President Richard M. Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China and developed a strong stable of reporters during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

Now, at U.S. News, he was dealing with college presidents, educational data and algorithms.

“He was a pivotal figure,” said Bob Morse, the chief data strategist of U.S. News, who worked closely with Elfin to hone the methodologies behind the rankings. “He embraced the fact that the rankings were needed and that serving consumers was our primary mission.”

The rankings had begun in a rudimentary way in 1983, but under Elfin’s stewardship, their criteria were broadened, graduate schools were ranked and U.S. News’ Best Colleges guidebook was published, expanding on the information in the magazine (which is now published only online).

The rankings helped U.S. News differentiate itself from Time and Newsweek in the newsweekly race and build a new source of revenue. They also became an unavoidable presence for college-bound high school juniors and seniors and their anxious parents.

Elfin, who was the special projects editor at U.S. News (he also wrote a column about Washington politics), faced pushback about the quality and meaning of the rankings. Some critics believed that the rankings formula created a false air of scientific certainty, caused colleges and universities to adjust their policies — or fudge their figures — to raise their rankings, and turned the choice of a college from an essentially educational issue to a high-stakes economic and social transaction.

And some school officials howled when their institutions dropped in rank.

But Elfin defended the rankings as an effective way for students and parents to comparison-shop for higher education.

“When you buy a VCR for 200 bucks, you can buy Consumer Reports to find out what’s out there,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1997, the year he retired. “When you spend 100 grand on four years of college, you should have some independent method of comparing different colleges. That’s what our readers want, and they’ve voted at the newsstand in favor of what we’re doing.”

But he conceded that it was impossible to create an ideal formula to evaluate the merits of a college or university. He told The Chicago Tribune in 1997 that the rankings were “one tool.”

“Look at it, but it’s not the be-all,” Elfin said. “There are other things to consider.”

Melvin Elfin was born in Brooklyn on July 18, 1929. His father, Joseph, was a truck driver, and his mother, Bessie (Margolis) Elfin, was a homemaker. Mel attended Brooklyn Technical High School, where he worked at the student radio station, and studied journalism at Syracuse University. He earned a master’s degree in American civilization at Harvard.

After working briefly as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Boston, he was hired as a reporter by The Long Island Daily Press, where he won a George Polk Award in 1956 for a series that exposed unethical practices in the home mortgage industry.

Two years later, Elfin joined Newsweek as a features writer for the magazine’s back-of-the-book sections. He rose to education editor and was named Washington bureau chief in 1965, succeeding Ben Bradlee, who had been hired by Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, as its deputy managing editor.

At Newsweek, Elfin had a reputation as a witty, no-nonsense, sarcastic and high-strung boss.

“He made the work so exciting,” Eleanor Clift, one of the bureau’s former reporters, said by telephone. “I’d go to a mundane White House briefing, then head into his corner office, which was like sticking your head in the lion’s den. You had to throw him a fresh piece of meat.” In 1969, Elfin hosted a dinner at his house in Washington for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew with a guest list that included bureau reporters and Graham, whose Washington Post empire included Newsweek. Agnew’s attacks against the news media concerned Newsweek and many other print and broadcast outlets, and his abrasiveness that night did little to assuage the guests’ concerns.

“What we all had for dinner was pure essence of Agnew,” Elfin wrote with his colleague Robert Shogan in a post-dinner memorandum that Graham cited in “Personal History” (1997), her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography. “It may or may not be reassuring to know that the man doesn’t sound or act differently in a semiprivate, semisocial situation than he does in public.”

Elfin had a strong relationship with Graham, which led him occasionally to write speeches for her.

“'Melsie, I’ve got to speak to the newspaper editors ... and I need five pages,'” Graham would say to him, recalled Thelma McMahon, the bureau’s office manager, in the book “Power, Privilege and the Post” (1993), a biography of Graham by Carol Felsenthal.

Elfin left Newsweek after years of battles with higher-ups at the magazine in Manhattan.

“He fought first of all to persuade New York of the importance of a development or a story — put it in the magazine or give it more space than they often wanted,” Richard Thomas, a former chief economics correspondent at Newsweek, said by email. “He also completely backed his reporters’ findings of facts and interpretation against editorial rewrite in New York."

In addition to his son, Elfin is survived by his wife, Margery (Lesser) Elfin, a former professor of politics at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland; a daughter, Dana Elfin; and four grandchildren.