Is College Rankings really that important?

Lists are a common sorting mechanism in American society- and boy do we love our lists!  We will rank pretty much everything, from the Billboard’s Top 100, Forbes 400, People’s Sexiest Man Alive, we can’t get enough of it!   So why wouldn’t we rank our universities by overall school, size of campus, programs, and pretty much any other part of the college experience?  And as incoming freshmen begin their college searches it is so easy for them to find these lists and get caught up in their rankings. But is a school’s ranking really that important? Or even a valuable data point?  The answer is debatable but let us spend some time exploring how these lists rankings are actually formulated, and then you can decide on how valuable they are in your search.  

One of the most sought out and widely publicized college rankings is US News Best Colleges list(s).  They publish their list every year in both print and online (limited access without purchase to the full publication) and they even offer a college search online system  “College Compass”.  Per their website, for $39.95 you get access to custom ranking, expert tips, updates on when new rankings are released, notifications when updates to the system are live, expanded profiles of the schools (from what you can already find on their main website), financial aid info (although they don’t specify what information is actually being provided), campus life and sport programs, advance sorting functions, as well as access to their trusted partners and sponsors- for one year.  College Compass offers a “one-stop-shop” kind of experience for their subscribers.  It allows students to gather multiple data points they need to make valuable decisions on which schools they want to possibly attend without having to spend hours combing through university websites themselves to find the information.  As of 2016, US News uses seven categories of data in their formula that produces their rankings: 

• Reputational Ratings (22.5%)
• ​Retention and Graduation Rate (20%)
• Student Selectivity (12.5%)
• Financial Resources (10%)
• Alumni Giving (5%)
• Graduation Rate Performance (7.5%)

The Reputational Ratings are based on a poll given to a group of college presidents, provosts, admissions deans, and high school counselors with a return rate of less than 50% from college administrators and less than 10% of high school counselors.  The responses collected, rate aspects of the quality of undergraduate programs and selectivity of admission on a 1 to 5 scale from “marginal” to “distinguished” and an optional “I don’t know” answer. As you can imagine this group is not always familiar with every school on the list, so we can assume there are a fair amount of “I don’t know” responses.  Additionally critics of college rankings, such as the authors of “Admission Matters: What Students and Parents Need To Know About Getting Into College; Fourth Edition”, would say that lists such as US News does not take into account additional factors in there overall data collection such as professor’s salaries or bonuses for publications, marketing campaigns of universities to draw in students as well as faculty, class size, geographical location of campus, etc.  That being said, US News is ever changing their formula from year to year to address gaps or holes in their formula to make their rankings more accurate each and every year, hence schools rising or lowering.  

One of the biggest flaws in any publicized college ranking, is that it doesn’t account for EVERY available school choice.  Instead most lists focus roughly on about 150 schools at a time.  This is due to the vast number of universities in the United States and to not overwhelm the researcher.   Therefore, these lists are really ranking schools who have done a better job marketing themselves to the rankers.  

​So does this mitigate the result of these lists? No, I don’t think it does.  There are multiple reasons why schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford sit at top of almost any ranking out there.  They are extremely good schools and produce extremely qualified individuals for their chosen fields.  But is that to say a graduate of a lesser known university can not be as successful as an Ivy League graduate- I think not!  My point for those of you who have stuck around long enough to finish this lengthy blog post, is you should definitely look at and take into consideration college rankings; but just don’t base your entire decision around what you find on them.  Let them be more of a starting point for your research rather than all that you do.  Think of them as Wikipedia, a great way to start off but you could never cite or write a paper off what you find!