Every fall season, the U.S. News and World Report releases its annual college guides in the form of a variety rankings. It has become so popular that prospective parents and high school students see it as a gold standard for choosing which college to apply to. It also “exacerbates the status of anxiety” of students, as the prominent author Joe Nocera, put it in a column last year.
The U.S. News rankings have won a broad and popular audience because it has appeared for 30 years in first place. Also, the ranking usually puts all Ivy League schools and other private research institutions on top 20 spots, which fits the sense of what people usually think. So what’s the trouble with this ranking?
What people commonly do in looking at the ranking is to look at the scores and orders, but few of them pay any heed on the methodology employed on the ranking. In essence, its methodology has changed year to year, which makes it less reliable.
The U.S. News’ newest rankings rely on seven weighted variables, such as undergraduate academic reputation with 22.5 percent, acceptance and freshmen retention rate with 20 percent. One of the measures facing harsh criticism is the undergraduate reputation.
This method doesn’t come from hard data, but surveys where U.S. News solicits “peer assessments” from college presidents, provosts and admission directors, as well as input from high school counselors. These surveys ask college and high school officials to rate relative merits of other schools. But these people in fact know little about specific performance of other schools. Their assessments of other colleges are to a great extent driven by the ranking itself.
In this sense, the people who are getting surveyed do not matter. If an average American college student is asked to rate and order Harvard and Duke, he or she might be most likely put Harvard on the top. This is the reason why Malcolm Gladwell put it in New Yorker that this reputational measure is simply a collection of “prejudice” that turn the U.S. News’ rankings into a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Another measure that has taken heat recently is the acceptance rate. The U.S. News’ rankings have given colleges enormous incentives to game around the system where they find some measures are easy to boost with little work. Acceptance rate is one of them.
Some colleges spend a lot of money on advertising to attract more students to apply for them, expanding the pool of applicants thus lowering the acceptance rate. In this way, schools simply show that they are more selective. The U.S.News national university ranking of 2014 is a case in point.
Colorado School of Mines, a small college with only 4,169 students that specializes on applied sciences and engineering programs, ranks 91th in the ranking. Its acceptance rate is 34.7 percent. N.C. State, a large research university, with its acceptance rate 49.6 percent, ranks 101th. But the two colleges are not even in the same dimension when it comes to comparison.
With all these shortcomings being said, is anything good about the U.S. News rankings? Yes, along with other version of college rankings published by different news media, the U.S. News rankings give a brief landscape to people who know nothing about the U.S. higher education, but they are not for U.S. students who are searching for higher education with superb quality.
Top rankings schools don’t necessarily mean a high-quality education at all. The quality of education should refer to student oriented activities, such as performance of students in schools, the chances that students can receive attention from professors and curriculums that highly fits the goal of education.
According to George Leef of the Pope Center of Higher Education, curriculums of some top-ranked schools are watered down and classes are fairly easy. Professors in many Ivy League schools don’t pay enough attentions to students but research, providing little feedback of their schoolwork. Therefore, students could get a better higher education if they get into a less prestigious school where the curriculum is stronger and students have more guidance from professors.
A little tip to choose schools is not to rely too much on any kind of rankings but do research on your own. Look at specific schools and programs and find out their faculty members, curriculums, campus environments and so on. It definitely takes more time but the effort helps find the best college, not the highest ranked.
