What College Rankings Show and What They Don’t Show

Many parents and students have read or purchased a copy of U. S. News and World Report Issue Best Colleges. That is the biggest selling issues of the magazine every year. In fact, their website received over eighteen million view on the first day of the issue’s release, showing the power that U.S. News has in shaping the opinions of college-going students. But are those rankings really accurate or worthy? There are several opinions about that, but since this is my blog, I’ll give you mine.

Any ranking document can be helpful. For one thing, they help identify important information about an institution, such as its size, the  majors and minors offered, and statistics on graduate school acceptance or job placement. Much of the information comes from the schools themselves, since who else would know what majors they offer? The ranking part comes from surveys of institutions which ask them to identify the best in their respective category, other than themselves. So if university X is ranked as number one by thirty other institutions, whereas university Y is rated number one by twenty five other schools, university X “wins.” But that has nothing to do with how smart their students are or whether the education on university X campus is better for any student, or how it would be for your student.

Many people say that U.S. News and World Reports rankings focus on what are the superficial features of a university, rather than on important features such as the teaching and learning environment, and what students actually learn. Instead, it perpetuates a system of haves and have nots, primarily because it implies that schools not listed high on their reputation lists aren’t good schools which is simply not true. I mean, let’s be honest, with some of the powerhouse schools that are often at the tops of rankings, how much rooms is there for another institution to get there? Further U.S. News doesn’t do anything to verify or describe the academic nature of a campus, or student learning outcomes, which is the whole point of a higher education.

Let’s look at one popular item, the acceptance rate. Conventional wisdom says that a school is better if it has a lower acceptance rate. Separating community colleges with open admission policies out of the equation, if a college admits 75% of applicants versus 50% for another, the college that admits a smaller percentage of applicants is viewed as better by U.S. News and by many others. But that’s not necessarily true. There are lots of schools that may have high acceptance rates because they also have lower applicant pools. Their low applicant pools may result from their being located in remote areas that students don’t want to go to. Yet, that school might be the prefect or preferred location for your student.

And let’s be honest, the only acceptance rate that really matters to your student is getting into their school of choice. When that happens, do you really care that your student’s school had an acceptance rate of 75% versus 60%? I don’t, and I didn’t when my daughter got her acceptance to her first choice school.

A helpful statistic that U.S. News highlights (that you can find in lots of other places) are the four and six year graduation rates for colleges and universities. This lets you know the approximate percentage of students who graduate in four or six years, which you can compare institution to institution. Be mindful and take the ratings with a grain of salt, however. If your student is considering a medium size public school in your state versus a smaller independent one, you might find a significant difference between the rates with the independent college winning However, that doesn’t tell the whole story, since institution type, size, and resources play a factor as well. The rankings can be a good starting point, however.

Lots of colleges and universities just hate the U.S. News rankings, and many have been protesting by not completing surveys for the magazine. But here’s the hypocrisy: as soon as a college or university gets a high ranking in U. S. News, they put a button on their home page declaring that fact. So unfortunately, the same colleges that hate the rankings are perfectly happy to exploit them when they get a high ranking.

The moral? Your student’s research on what he or she is looking for and what matters to them: those are the only rankings that really matter.