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Families that eagerly await the annual U.S. News & World Report College Edition may place too much reliance on it. They may be assuming that the complexities of college selection can be made easy by a magazine’s rankings.

Some families rely on the rankings because they seek an easy way out of the stress of college selection. Families, especially students, would be better served to put time into the hard work necessary to identify the colleges that fit them best. College rankings are among the tools that may be used to make this task less burdensome, but there are no shortcuts for College List building that wouldn’t detract from a student’s educational potential.

The College Rankings Publications

Since 1983, U.S. News & World Report (U. S. News) has published an annual College Edition that ranks American colleges in various categories. Although U. S. News is the most popular, they are not alone in this market niche. Other publications that release annual college rankings include Forbes, Princeton Review, Money, Barron’s, Kiplinger’s, College Atlas, the Economist, and the New York Times. They are all reputable, unbiased sources that base their analyses on the same data (the Common Data Set) but arrive at different rankings based on their distinctive methodologies.

The Current Rankings Controversy

The U.S. News College Edition is published annually in September. Each year, this sets off an undeserved avalanche of criticism that The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls a “National Carpfest.”  The 2023 rankings are causing more carping than usual, mainly from law and medical schools, which aren’t our concern here. However, two undergraduate colleges, the Rhode Island School of Design and Colorado College, have stated that they will no longer cooperate with U.S. News because they feel that the rankings reinforce social inequities. Other schools have also expressed dissatisfaction with U.S. News and college rankings in general.

This mini-movement against magazine rankings has prompted speculation that colleges will abandon them. This is unlikely. By and large, rankings are useful to colleges. However, U.S. Education Department Secretary Miguel Cardona essentially called for abandonment at a recent conference. He said that colleges should:

“Stop worshiping at the false altar of U.S. News and World Report. Rankings disincentivize the wealthiest institutions from enrolling and graduating more underserved students. That’s because doing so harms their selectivity, a factor in the U.S. News formula. Colleges, not some for-profit magazine, should set the higher education agenda.”

To some, it’s incongruous that Secretary Cardona blames the magazines for the fact that college rankings are misused. His position draws attention to a common criticism of college administrations. Many institutions adopt policies and practices based on the likelihood that they will raise their position in the rankings. They are

accused of assigning a higher priority to their position in the rankings than to more important considerations.

Administrators engage in practices to manipulate their data in order to generate improved metrics for rankings calculations. Many administrators do this routinely because a rise in rank helps them justify tuition and salary increases. It is not illegal, but it is unethical.  Consequences are rare, but occasionally a college gets called out for it in the media, as have Baylor and, more recently, Columbia. This is not a good look for a high prestige institution.

In their response to Secretary Cardona, U.S. News observed that colleges simply don’t like to be compared to each other by objective third-parties. They asserted that he should require colleges to be more transparent with their data, stating:

“More openness from colleges would allow prospective students and their families to make meaningful comparisons between institutions based on factors such as financial information, admissions data, and outcome statistics.”

Rankings As Perceived By Parents and Students

The rankings publications are entitled to publish anything they wish about colleges without fearing legal repercussions. They benefit from freedom of the press and are fully protected by the first amendment. Concerns arise not about the college rankings themselves but in the way that many families perceive and use them.

The main concern is that many families fail to understand that rankings can’t take into account the qualitative factors that matter most to students. Each student has their own combination of financial resources, talents, preferences, experiences, goals, and personal characteristics. Finding a student’s best-fit colleges should be the result of a subjective analysis by the student that accommodates these factors. It can’t be done properly by using only a formula-driven calculation — the methodology used by the publishers. Rankings can serve as useful information in a student’s college search — but only in a secondary role behind subjective analysis.

When purchasing a product like a car or TV, a publication that assists decision-making like Consumer Reports is a resource that can be relied upon. They conduct research, analyze, and test products. They rank them from the best-buy on down.

That choosing a college is not like buying a TV is an obvious understatement, but the magazines can only rank colleges as if they were three-dimensional products. The important  non-quantifiable features can’t be validly compared in this manner.

Rankings as a Reference Source

College rankings can also serve as handy reference sources for a wide range of information about colleges. U.S. News  devotes substantial effort every year to compiling and analyzing information relating to more than 3,000 colleges — about 75% of the U.S. total. All of the rankings publications generate comparisons of institutions of similar types on a level playing field! These comparisons are based on mathematical models that incorporate the factors that, in the assessment of the publishers, contribute most to the quality and value of a college education.

Understanding Rankings Methodologies

Families should decide for themselves how much credence to place on college rankings. To help make this decision, they should review a publication’s methodology. As an example, a summary of the indicators used in the U.S. News formula for undergraduate colleges and the weights assigned to them is provided below in Table A.

Table A

U.S. News Ranking Indicators & Weights