The U.S. News and World Report College Rankings issue has become the bible of college quality. Some colleges hate it, some love it, all buy into one way or another.
Every year, there’s talk among administrators about withdrawing from the rankings (note: the majority of schools included in the magazine have given their consent by completing and returning surveys of data).
And it’s always the same schools that complain: the ones in the “middle,” who think that the rankings underrate the quality of their institutions. They may very well be right. These rankings were devised by editors to sell magazines not by educators to evaluate the quality of an institution.
U.S. News is so entrenched in our culture that few people know much about how it evolved to become “the decider” of college cache. So, here’s the skinny on College Rankings:
In the early 1980s, there was a dip in the population of college-age students after the Baby Boomers finished college. To counteract this effect, colleges embarked on a marketing blitz, sending catalogs, newsletters, and videos into hundreds of thousands of homes. Good students now had a myriad of colleges from which to choose. Editors at U.S. News and World Report speculated that high achieving students needed a way to evaluate the relative value of the postsecondary institutions who were aggressively courting them.
In 1983, they published an issue of college rankings. Parents and students thoroughly bought into this hierarchy. A survey conducted in the early 1990s found that 79 percent of students attending the “highest selectivity college” and 59 percent of those attending “high selectivity colleges” said that rankings were at least “somewhat important in their choice of college.”
Another study done by economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2003 showed a statistically significant relationship between a decline in the rankings and a decrease in application numbers.
It seems that kidz care about college rankings.
The U.S. News and World Report rankings are also somewhat responsible for the strong emphasis that colleges place on SAT scores in the undergraduate admissions process. U.S. News considers the average SAT scores for the entering class of each school that they evaluate, which creates an incentive for colleges to use these tests in ways that they are not meant to be used.
While some means of standardization is necessary to compare students in an international applicant pool, the College Board clearly articulates that these tests should not be used in isolation of other, more predictive, academic indicators like the high school transcript. Though colleges claim to look at many academic indicators, admissions officers tend to over-rely on the SAT because it is convenient, standardized, and used by external evaluators to judge the academic quality of an entering class. Average SAT scores at selective colleges continue to increase each year.
Another major factor in determining the U.S. News rankings is a college’s “selectivity,” or how many students a college turns away. That’s like measuring the quality of a hospital by how many patients it does not treat! Even with the current demographic bulge and unprecedented increases in application numbers, colleges aggressively court many, many more students than they ever hope to enroll to boost their U.S. News rank.
The only way for educators to take back the reigns and set their own standards for quality in higher education is for all colleges to boycott the magazine. But the “top” schools are enjoying their penthouse view.
Every year, the New York Times writes a “Colleges Complain About U.S.News Rankings” article. Here’s my favorite quote from this morning’s piece:
“We really want to reclaim the high ground on this discussion,” said Katherine Will, the president of Gettysburg College and the incoming president of the Annapolis Group. “We should be defining the conversation, not a magazine that uses us for its business plan.” The association did not take a formal vote and each college will make its own decision, Dr. Will said….
Other college presidents who attended the meeting were more cautious. Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst, which is ranked second among liberal arts colleges, said he was not ready to stop cooperating with U.S. News and wanted to continue to discuss the issue.
Give me a break!
It’s almost like Amherst saying to Gettysberg: “I’m sorry, G. But this is business, not friendship.”
You say that “all schools included in the magazine have given their consent by completing and returning surveys of data.”
Your claim is patently false. Reed College has repeatedly asked U.S. News simply to drop it from the best-colleges issue, yet the magazine continues to include Reed and to harvest data from non-Reed sources. The college does not return any of their surveys.
Please correct this fundamental error in your article.
See http://web.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/college_rankings.html.
Thank you for correcting my error, Ron. I should have said, “the vast majority of colleges” instead. I will now go back and correct the original text.
Thanks again.
In the beginning of junior year, my then english teacher made us read an article that was basically agaisnt the U.S. News. At that point, I had no clue what the U.S. News college rankings were.
So when I did discover it (thanks to CC), I already knew how untrustworthy those rankings really are.
But I did have a friend who told me after all college decisions came out, “you should go to XXXX College cause it’s number XX on the rankings!”
[...] author of the ‘Kidz Today’ column at Crucial Minutiae, says that for better or worse, kidz care about the US News College Rankings. She details briefly the genesis of the rankings: In the early 1980s, there was a dip in the [...]
It is really disturbing that the top schools go to such great lengths to recruit applicants who have no chance of being accepted… especially when it costs $60 to apply!
Universities are a business – so your observation Amhurst is accurate. Hype or not the rankings do count. Schools make money off of their admissions offices so getting you to apply is not just about prestige it puts dollars and cents into the register.