It’s that time of year again. The new US News & World Report rankings are out. And so, the season of silliness begins again.
Much has been written about changes US News made this year to its ranking methodology (placing greater weight on its social mobility metric). Some high-profile, private institutions that were particularly rankled that their ranking had dropped, have drawn attention after issuing statements decrying the new weighting as deemphasizing “educational quality” (as if the rankings were ever a good barometer of educational quality). On the other end of the spectrum, several of the beneficiaries of the new metrics, mainly public institutions, are predictably celebrating the changes.
That presidents and other senior institutional officers engage in urgent post-rankings spin of this sort may seem undignified and hard to fathom. But the truth is at a significant number of US colleges and universities the US News rankings are taken very seriously and treated as if they are crucial metrics of institutional performance and standing.
They are not.
The rankings are not a valid measure of educational quality or effectiveness and suggesting otherwise is, well, silly. Keep in mind, the single most influential metric in US News’ rankings remains the entirely subjective “Peer Assessment” where college presidents, provosts, and admissions deans rank the other colleges in their institutional category. Never mind the obvious conflicts of interest involved, it is preposterous to believe that the voting presidents, provosts, and deans could possibly have enough detailed knowledge of the hundreds of institutions in their peer group to make informed assessments necessary to rank them. Still, “Peer Assessment” (20%) counts more than “Graduation Rates” (16%), “First-Year Retention” (5%), or “Student-Faculty Ratio” (4%). And there is no measure employed that is even tangentially connected to actual learning outcomes or the quality of the student experience. Because, of course, there is no objective way to truly measure learning outcomes or the quality of the student experience for millions of students at thousands of different institutions.
But college rankings, no matter how flawed or inaccurate, appeal to qualities that matter to the target audience – competition, excellence, status, and membership in something exclusive. Even the fiercest rankings critics (me included) feel a little jolt of pride when they see their alma mater or the institutions with which they’ve been associated moving up or near the top of the rankings. We all like to be told we’re special, even if deep down we know we’re being handed a bill of goods. And we all like feeling superior to others – especially when we moved up 3 places and our smug colleague’s college fell 6 spots in this year’s rankings. Sure, it’s hard to take seriously a publication that classifies military academies as liberal arts colleges, but did you see we’re in the top 25 this year! So, college rankings – and the spinoffs that followed (e.g., high schools, law schools, medical schools, etc.) sell enough ads and magazines to have propped up a failing news magazine for almost 40 years.
In the end, though, none of that is what bothers me about the US News rankings. What bothers me is that the US News rankings are bad for colleges and bad for students.
The starkest case in point is the staggering degree to which the influence of US News rankings has changed the college admissions process. To be sure, admission to the most prominent and selective institutions had steadily grown more competitive in the decades before US News first published its college rankings in 1983, and there is no reason to believe that trend would not have continued if the rankings had never come along. But it is undeniable that managing to the specific metrics US News uses has profoundly impacted college admissions – and not in ways that benefit students. Here are just a few examples to prove the point:
The rankings impart status and a sense of relative value to prospective students and their families that greatly influences how they approach the admission process. To say that US News has contributed to the selective college admissions arms race is an understatement of epic proportions. The pressure to gain admission to a highly-ranked college seems to increase exponentially over time. Which in turn has undoubtedly contributed to the rise in anxiety-related mental health issues among children and adolescents. Additionally, that pressure has given rise to an admissions industrial complex on which students and their families spend staggering sums of money. USA Today reports that the Independent Educational Consultants Association estimates Americans spend $500 million a year on private college counselors. According to Forbes, twice that amount – $1 billion a year! – is spent on test prep courses for the ACT, SAT, etc. That’s $1.5 billion dollars a year that doesn’t include the piles of money spent on youth sports, theater/music/arts programs, summer programs at colleges, service trips, or any of the litany of other extracurriculars students pursue to enhance their college resumés. Nor does it include the cost of visiting prospective colleges or application fees. And all that spending starts years before anyone has to start writing college tuition checks.
Colleges spend millions of dollars each year to increase the number of applicants they reject because lower admit rates improve their selectivity score in the rankings. While there is a compelling argument for casting a wider net to attract new applicants and increase the diversity of the pool, the emphasis on quantity has led to huge numbers of applicants who have little or no chance of being admitted. Additionally, it has forced admissions staff to adopt reading procedures at the most selective institutions that often limit the time spent reviewing an application to seven minutes or less. It is hard to make a convincing argument that anyone – the applicants who pour so much time and effort into preparing their applications, the readers who are trying to give full and fair consideration to 100 (or more) applications a day for three months straight, or the institutions that are trying to shape the best possible first-year class each year – is particularly well-served by this assembly line approach to admissions.
Similarly, because a high yield rate (the percentage of admitted students who enroll) improves the selectivity score, most selective colleges have significantly increased the percentage of students who are accepted through binding early admission (ED) processes where all admitted students are required to enroll. In a few recent cases, top colleges have taken more than 70% of their class ED! For colleges – More ED admits guarantee a higher yield rate and helps them manage class size more precisely. But at most institutions, it also means fewer slots for some of the most qualified applicants who tend to apply through the regular admission process. And admitting more students through ED translates to filling a higher percentage of the incoming class from an applicant pool that disproportionately includes students from educationally and socioeconomically privileged backgrounds. For students – Because the odds of being admitted ED are significantly better than through regular admission, the college search process is frequently short-circuited. Students in the know who are applying to the most selective colleges see ED as a strategic imperative that is more about determining which of the “reach” schools on a student’s list they’re most likely to get into rather than finding the college that is the best match for them. More importantly, because those who get in at ED withdraw the rest of their applications to other schools, they don’t have the time or opportunity to consider other choices in the spring of their senior year – when they are six months older and have a clearer sense of what they want and need from college.
The ways in which colleges manage to the US News rankings are by no means limited to areas that relate directly to admissions either. No one would argue that students benefit from small classes that facilitate active engagement and foster meaningful student–faculty relationships. But how well served are students who can’t get into required courses because colleges have capped course enrollments at 19 and won’t allow professors to admit two or three additional students because it will adversely affect their percentage of classes under 20? Is it reasonable to believe that a student–faculty ratio of 7:1 actually leads to better learning outcomes than one of 11:1? And is it the best use of limited resources to task institutional research offices with dissecting the US News data to better understand why your institution moved slightly one way or the other, how you measure up to your closest competitors, and what steps you can take to maybe move the needle a place or two in your favor next year? All these choices have real impact on students and measurable cost implications for institutions.
I’m not suggesting that the rankings are insignificant or don’t matter. While the extent to which they impact student decision-making about where they will apply and attend college is open to debate – and recent data indicate their influence is less than many have previously believed it to be – no one can deny that the rankings garner a great deal of attention and play a role in shaping public perceptions about individual colleges. So, it is understandable that institutional leaders feel compelled to participate year after year.
But as US News continues to move the goalposts by frequently changing the rankings formula and the arbitrariness of this entirely commercial enterprise becomes increasingly evident to everyone, we can hope that more leading colleges will follow the colleges and law schools that have walked away from it in the past couple of years. It’s past time for this 40-year season of silliness to come to an end once and for all.
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