Depending on whether you count trade schools and community colleges, by some estimates there are approximately 4000 colleges and universities in the United States. According to some calculations, that number is as low as 3000. Regardless of what metric you use, higher education is an enormous industry in the US, even if the overwhelming majority of US colleges are non-profit organizations. In light of a challenging landscape for higher education in the United States, including financial pressures from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession, as well as lingering affects of the Great Recession of 2008-2010, and political pressures from various governors who want to control what students learn and how they learn it, colleges are dependent on public awareness and generating positive media attention to grow, and sometimes just survive.
Enter the news outlet U.S. News & World Report, which releases their annual college rankings according to various, somewhat arbitrary, criteria, every September. Unlike major news sources such as the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, NPR and PBS Newshour, U.S. News & World Report is rarely considered an important source of news. Instead, this organization makes a big splash every year by ranking colleges and universities. But how useful or accurate are these college rankings?
How College Rankings are Determined
According to the U.S. News & World Report website, they consider a wide variety of factors in determining a college’s rankings. Some of these factors are objective, like student graduation rates, student first-year retention rates, class sizes and student-faculty ratio, and average college spend per student. Many other factors, such as the opinions of industry experts, social mobility, graduation performance versus journalist predictions, and student excellence, are subjective, based more on feelings than data.
Despite the fuzziness of the value of the rankings, colleges spend a great deal of time making minor adjustments to their numbers in order to climb the rankings. Colleges pressure their faculty to publish more articles and papers to improve industry expert opinion of their programs. Colleges tweak the admissions numbers to alter the balance of lower income students in their freshman classes. They have also created the concept of superscoring SAT and ACT scores in order to boost their numbers moderately.
College Ranking Distinctions
Another concern is that U.S. News & World Report keeps separate lists for “national” universities, “liberal arts” colleges, and “regional” colleges and universities. These distinctions are often arbitrary. What is the difference between a “national” university and a “regional” university? The answer seems to be historical fame. Most colleges in the “liberal arts” list seem to be there because they call themselves College rather than University, but it also may be due to the percentage of students who attend undergraduate programs versus those who attend graduate programs at a particular institution.
Ultimately, these lists seem to be more of a list of how famous a college is rather than its quality. Between 2021 and 2022, for example, Columbia University dropped from 2nd place to 18th place in the national college rankings. Is it reasonable to believe that Columbia was 16 places worse only a year later? Or is it more likely that 14 other colleges gamed their numbers to climb past Columbia?
While these lists may be useful for highly ambitious students who are focused on applying to the most famous and prestigious colleges, most students are better served by focusing on their own goals and needs. Most students should build a list of colleges that have the academic programs that excite them, the campus culture that interests them, and the community that will be support them.