The Scoop on the U.S. News Rankings

    What makes a school a “top” college?  For many, this simply means placement at the “top” of the U.S. News & World Report annual college rankings.  After years of criticism, the U.S. News rankings are still looked to as the final word on how colleges stack up against each other. 

U.S. News & World Report stumbled onto a goldmine when it first published the college rankings issue in 1983.  It sold so well that the U.S. News staff referred to it as their “swimsuit issue.”  The rankings issue has even outlived the hard copy version of the magazine.  In November 2010, U.S. News ceased printing and shifted to an online format.  What was the only issue to remain on newsstands?  The U.S. News annual rankings.      

Why are the U.S. News rankings still so popular, especially among students fixated on the top of the list?  Academics and university administrators have long questioned the legitimacy of the rankings, but this criticism does not seem to have reached those who need to hear it the most – students and parents.  Did you know that Stanford President Gerhard Casper wrote a protest letter to U.S. News in 1996, and in 1997 Stanford refused to submit “reputational ranking” data to the magazine?  Or that in 2007 Yale hosted a conference titled “Beyond Ranking” as part of the movement to find an alternative to the broken and misleading commercial rankings?  If not, read on.

Below are the reasons critics give more weight to David Letterman’s Top Ten list than the U.S. News list.

Colleges game the system.  Thanks to one Dean of Admissions, we have a window into what he calls the “blatant falsification of data” pulled off by deans and admissions staff at “excellent U.S. colleges with selective admissions policies.”  As he writes in the essay “Faked Figures Make Fools of Us,” James M. Sumner, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Grinnell College, colleges improve their rank by not including data for “development cases” (students accepted because of family’s gifts), student athletes, legacies and waitlist students.  These students are often the weaker students offered admission.  Sumner writes his sources also admitted to calculating in-house, adjusted SAT/ACT scores before reporting them to U.S. News, and using tactics to drive up the number of applications. 

Reputation is everything.  Every year, U.S. News sends “reputational surveys” to college administrators asking them to rank their peer institutions.  Critics complain that these surveys are merely popularity contests and reinforce preconceived notions, since administrators rarely know in detail what is happening on other college campuses.  The survey results comprise 22.5% of the final U.S. News rank, more than any other factor (for a full list of the U.S. News ranking factors see: http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2010/08/17/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings?PageNr=4).  To address this criticism, U.S. News now sends the surveys to high school guidance counselors.  Regardless of who fills out the survey, we should question why reputation plays such a dominant role in the rankings at all.  Doesn’t this just lead students to make decisions for the wrong reasons?

The list is biased, at least according to the writings of statistician Amy Graham and journalist Nicholas Thompson (who founded Forget U.S. News Coalition (FUNC) as a Stanford student).  Graham and Thompson claim that the ranking favors the alma maters of the U.S. News editors - Harvard, Princeton and Yale.  “Upsetting that equilibrium,” they wrote in 2001, “upsets the equilibrium in the U.S. News publishing offices.”

It’s all in how you crunch the numbers.  In 1999, the same Amy Graham from above was asked by U.S. News to lend her statistician’s eye to the ranking effort.  Graham’s formula placed greater weight on the money colleges actually spend on students, and in a shocking turn, Caltech ended up in the #1 spot (up from #9 in 1998).  The next year, the formula was reworked again and Harvard, Princeton and Yale were restored to the top three spots.  The truth is that the rankings, like the college admissions process, are not scientific but human endeavors.  Most students probably do not know that U.S. News takes into account faculty salaries and alumni giving.  Nicholas Thompson described the U.S. News methodology as: “Good students plus good faculty equals good school…That’s like measuring the quality of a restaurant by calculating how much it paid for silverware and food: not completely useless, but pretty far from ideal.” 

The ranking does not measure how much students learn in college.  To be fair to U.S. News, it must be said that the quality of an education is very difficult to define, and even harder to measure.  Yet critics point to the hoops colleges jump through to rise in the rankings and argue that if U.S. News asked for the right data, colleges would find a way to supply it.  Currently, schools that offer rigorous curriculums, like Caltech and University of Chicago, are punished by the rankings.   In his 1996 letter to U.S. News, the President of Stanford wrote:  “Caltech is crucified for having a predicted graduation rate of 99 percent and an actual graduation rate of 85 percent. Did it ever occur to the people who created this ‘measure’ that many students do not graduate from Caltech precisely because they find [the institution] too rigorous and demanding that is, adding too much value ­ for them?”

U.S. News has made an effort to respond to these challenges, and the Wizard of Oz behind the rankings, Bob Morse, even writes a blog to lend transparency to the system (http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog).  Colleges are also working together to find a better method of providing students the information they need for comparison shopping. 

So if you were rejected by a “top” college, chances are it was only considered “top” because U.S. News said so.  Recalculate the list based on your own priorities, and the schools that accepted you just might rise to the top!