Schools
Each year, U.S. News & World Report releases rankings that often change very little, even as they attract the attention and frustration of colleges and applicants.
Princeton University once again tops the national university rankings. An Rong Xu / The New York Times
After months of tumult on American college campuses, relative stability returned to one area Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report released its oft-maligned but closely watched rankings.
Many top schools held the same or similar positions as they did a year ago.
Among national universities, Princeton again ranked first, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to fourth. U.S. News again judged Williams College to be the best of the national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was named the nation’s first historically black institution.
Few franchises in American higher education are as controversial as the U.S. News rankings. Over the decades, their publisher has had to deal with issues related to manipulated data, complaints about obscure methodologies, accusations of retribution and the fundamental question of whether it is appropriate to rank universities.
For U.S. News, which shut down its print magazine in 2010, the rankings are a bastion of its largely defunct influence. They are also a source of millions of dollars each year, as universities pay licensing fees to promote their results. U.S. News, which insists that its business relationships with schools have no impact on the rankings, argues that it is performing a public service by distilling a chaotic college marketplace for weary consumers.
Indeed, for students and their parents, rankings can be tools to narrow college searches and status symbols surrounding admissions to certain schools. For college leaders, rankings are often publicly touted but privately loathed. For regulators, including Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona, rankings are responsible for an “unhealthy obsession with selectivity” and the growth of the “false altar of U.S. News & World Report.”
And to almost everyone outside the American news industry, they are opaque and, ultimately, almost uniformly misunderstood.
Critics have tarnished U.S. News’ brand over the years, but few dispute the ranking’s power as an imperfect cultural force. U.S. News says its education website attracts at least 100 million users a year. And in the coming weeks, many colleges will, as they have long done, likely print brochures, post social media posts and ask campus tour guides to tout their rankings.
U.S. News has structured its system, which offers honors in dozens of categories, so that hundreds of institutions can boast one or another of the superlatives. For example, nearly 350 institutions this year can claim to have one of the best undergraduate nursing programs in the country.
The largest categories — which include national universities, liberal arts colleges and historically black colleges and universities — typically see little change from year to year, especially at the top of the rankings. But last year, U.S. News overhauled its methodology. The publisher said it was the most significant overhaul since the rankings began in 1983.
Bowing to criticism that its model did not adequately account for ideals often touted by administrators, such as promoting social mobility, U.S. News placed more emphasis on retention and graduation rates for those receiving need-based Pell grants. As a result, some public universities climbed in the rankings, with more than a dozen institutions moving up 50 spots or more, while a handful of private institutions saw their status drop.
U.S. News made far fewer major changes this year, saying its “most significant” change was the decision to remove six-year graduation rates for first-generation students from some formulas. The publisher said that while it “still supports this measure in principle,” it has heard feedback that the measure is not standardized enough to be used for comparison purposes.
In turn, the rankings released Tuesday showed that consistency had largely returned — at least until U.S. News changed its formulas again.
Four universities that were already in the top 10 national universities — California Institute of Technology, Duke, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern — all climbed to a tie for No. 6. The University of Pennsylvania fell four spots to No. 10. Another Ivy League university, Brown, also fell four spots to a tie for No. 13 with Columbia, which fell one spot.
Columbia’s history with U.S. News is particularly complicated. Last year, the university announced that it would no longer provide the publisher directly with data for its undergraduate rankings, a move similar to that of its law and medical schools. Columbia had already fallen from second place to 18th after one of its professors accused it of submitting “inaccurate, questionable or highly misleading” data. That accusation led the university to acknowledge that it had submitted erroneous information.
Despite slight changes in the national university rankings this year, some have seen significant changes. For example, Tulane, whose president blasted U.S. News last year after the university jumped from 44th to 73rd, saw its ranking jump 10 spots this year.
The publisher noted that nine institutions climbed at least 40 places. But none of them moved above the 209th place tie.
“In all categories, schools in the middle tend to experience larger changes from year to year than those near the top and bottom because their data are very similar to each other, while the top and bottom performing schools are statistical outliers whose data are different from most of their peers,” U.S. News said.
Two reports in recent weeks have highlighted how tenuous the rankings remain and offered new avenues for debate over whether universities should court U.S. News’ favor.
Art & Science Group, a higher education consultancy, found that about 40% of students don’t use rankings at all when choosing colleges and only 3% refer to them throughout their college search.
Separately, Vanderbilt University was so upset by its five-spot drop in the U.S. News rankings last year that it commissioned a study of the methodologies of five ranking services. The resulting report argued that the rankings were riddled with flaws, including flawed data and subjectivity.
Ranking publishers regularly argue that their guides are essential but should not be the sole drivers of academic research.
U.S. News said it “strongly” advises visitors to its website to “consider the rankings, along with additional information from U.S. News and other sources, and in light of personal interests and priorities when deciding where to apply to and attend college.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
