The ubiquitous US News college rankings attempt to answer an inherently subjective question—“Where should I go to college?”—with hard numbers. While an admirable goal to some extent, the resulting list is anything but objective, and it certainly should not be make-or-break in your college selection process.
To create their annual list, US News collects a bunch of data about a college and uses it to calculate a weighted score, with different data categories (or “ranking factors”) receiving different weights. (For the record, US News decides how much to weight each factor and why.) These weighted scores are then sorted into a ranked list for purposes of comparison. You can read an in-depth breakdown on the ranking methodology on the US News website if you’re interested, but for prospective students (and parents), all you need to know is which three factors matter most to US News rankings: Graduation and Retention Rates account for 22% of the total score, while Undergraduate Academic Reputation and Faculty Resources get 20% each. Valuing these three factors above all others—including Financial Resources per Student (10%) and Graduate Indebtedness (5%)—tells you all you need to know about the limitations of this ranking system. Here’s why.
The rankings tell you nothing about the student experience
Ultimately, the point of going to college is to graduate with a degree, so it makes sense that graduation rates factor so heavily in the rankings. But graduation rates don’t tell the whole story—especially not when they’re prioritized above other factors that reflect the quality of student life. (The US News ranking factors do take class size and student-to-faculty ratio into account, but as part of Faculty Resources; interestingly, the Financial Resources per Student factor doesn’t include any such sub-categories.)
The hyper-focus on graduation rates should be the biggest takeaway for prospective students. An academically rigorous school with high graduation and retention rates could be a wonderful place to study for four years, or it could be a miserable, high-stress pressure cooker you’ll barely survive—and the rankings can’t differentiate between them. If you want to get a feel for a school’s environment and lifestyle, you’ll have to do your own research.
Prestigious private schools always come out on top
The other two of the Big Three factors—Faculty Resources and Undergraduate Academic Reputation—also make it hard to fully trust the rankings because they inherently favor expensive private schools. For Faculty Resources, it’s easy to see why: The more money a school has, the more resources its faculty are afforded; therefore, the richest schools get the highest scores. But the Undergraduate Reputation factor, which is determined entirely by a peer survey, is just as untrustworthy. Here’s how US News describes it on their website:
In the peer assessment survey, U.S. News asks the president, provost and dean of admissions at each school to rate the quality of the academic programs at schools in the same ranking category, including their own. Those unfamiliar with a particular school are asked to check a box labeled “don’t know.
In other words, a full 20% of a school’s score comes down to self-reported data from high-level administrators—including their own. It’s not hard to see how this shakes out in practice: Prestigious (and expensive) private schools already have the most name recognition and the best reputations, both of which obviously benefit them when it comes to outside peer assessment. Since these schools are also strongly motivated to maintain their reputations, they’ll rate themselves highly, too.
To US News’ credit, they acknowledge that their rankings aren’t the end-all, be-all of college decision-making. But given how much power they have in the world of higher education, one could easily argue that they are. As a prospective student, your task is to find the right college for you. The US News rankings may be flawed, but once you understand their biases, they can be a useful tool. Just make sure to base your decision on factors that are important to you, regardless of whether US News takes them into account: A school’s location, price, extracurricular programs, and overall vibes will affect your experience at a school just as much, if not more than, the list of factors that go into its “official” ranking.