The Best Colleges Rankings have raised significant controversy, and they have been widely denounced by many higher education experts.[1] Detractors argue that they rely on self-reported, sometimes fraudulent data by the institutions,[2][3][4][5] encourage gamesmanship by institutions looking to improve their rank,[6] imply a false precision by deriving an ordinal ranking from questionable data,[7] contribute to the admissions frenzy by unduly highlighting prestige,[8] and ignore individual fit by comparing institutions with widely diverging missions on the same scale.[9]
Columbia University was lowered from second to eighteenth in the 2022 rankings,[10] following a report by Columbia University mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus, which revealed that the administration had misreported data; the remaining "national universities" were not renumbered.[11]
Methodology
This article is missing information about an encyclopedic coverage of "methodology", which would convey some sense of whether/how the methodology has changed over the years - especially since criticism over the years is often tied to historical methodology. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page.(December 2023)
Following the onset of a boycott led by Yale Law School's 2022 withdrawal from cooperation with the U.S. News ranking system; the publication shifted greater emphasis to student outcomes over academic scores, and established a heightened reliance on published data, decreasing its traditional dependence on law school data submissions.[12]
In 2022, U.S. Secretary of EducationMiguel Cardona declared ranking systems akin to U.S. News to be "a joke."[13] Speaking at a Spring 2023 conference organized by Yale and Harvard Law Schools, amidst a backlash over the influential law school rankings; Cardona stated that they have "created an unhealthy obsession with selectivity" and that “We need a culture change".[14]
2023 rankings
U.S. News & World Report ranked a near total of 1,500 schools for 2023.[15] Changes to the formulation of the U.S. News rankings, released in 2023, were criticized as evidence of unreliable methodology. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, declared the many examples of abruptly altered results in its 2023 college rankings as "yet more evidence that rankings are not and never have been reliable indicators of quality."[16]
The following are the elements used in the National University rankings in the 2023 edition:[15]
"Outcomes" (52%):
Graduation and retention rates (21%): the proportion of each entering class earning a degree in six years or less (16%), and the proportion of first-year entering students who returned the following fall (5%)
Graduation rate performance (10%): actual six-year graduation rates compared with predictions for the fall 2014 entering class
Social mobility (11%): how well schools graduated students who received federal Pell Grants (6%), and graduation rates and performance of first generation students (5%)
Graduate indebtedness (5%): typical average accumulated federal loan debt by student borrowers
College Graduate Earning Potential (5%): amount of college graduates with federal loans 4 years after graduating are earning more than a typical high school graduate
"Faculty resources" (11%):
Faculty salary (6%)
Student-faculty ratio (3%)
Proportion of faculty who are full time (2%)
"Expert opinion" (20%): presidents, provosts and deans of admissions rate the academic quality of peer institutions with which they are familiar on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished)
"Financial resources" (8%): the average per-student spending on instruction, research, student services and related educational expenditures
"Student selectivity" (5%): the standardized test scores of admitted students and the proportion of admitted students in upper percentiles of their high school class
"Faculty Research" (4%): Amount of citations to papers and research attributed to faculty while employed at the college
The publication is split into four categories: National Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges, with the latter two categories further split into North, South, Midwest, and West.[17]
A 2014 study published in Research in Higher Education removed the mystique of the U.S. News ranking process by producing a ranking model that faithfully recreated U.S. News outcomes and quantified the inherent "noise" in the rankings for all nationally ranked universities.[18] The model developed provided detailed insight into the U.S. News ranking process. It allowed the impact of changes to U.S. News sub factors to be studied when variation between universities and within sub factors was present. Numerous simulations were run using this model to understand the amount of change required for a university to improve its rank or move into the top 20. Results show that for a university ranked in the mid-30s it would take a significant amount of additional resources, directed in a very focused way, to become a top-ranked national university, and that rank changes of up to +/− 4 points should be considered "noise".[18]
2023–24 rankings
As of U.S. News & World Report's most recent 2023–24 rankings,[19] the top 11 national universities, which are universities that "offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and doctoral programs", and "are committed to producing groundbreaking research", are:
The top 10 national liberal arts colleges, which are colleges that "emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study", are:[20]
For their 2014 release day, usnews.com garnered 2.6 million unique visitors and 18.9 million page views.[21][needs update]
Studies show that the U.S. News ranking influences college applications:
A University of Michigan study from 2010 found that university rankings in the United States significantly affect institutions' applications and admissions.[22] The research analyzed the effects of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, showing a lasting effect on college applications and admissions by students in the top 10% of their class.[22] In addition, they found that rankings influence survey assessments of reputation by college presidents at peer institutions, such that rankings and reputation are becoming much more similar over time.[23]
A 2011 study by Leadership and Management found that a one-rank improvement led to a 0.9% increase in the number of applicants.[24]
Some universities have made it a specific goal to reach a particular level in the U.S. News & World Report rankings:[25]
Clemson University's president James Frazier Barker made it a public goal in 2001 to rise to a top 20 public university in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, an made specific changes, including reducing class size and altering the presentation of teacher salaries, in an effort to perform better in the publication's statistical rankings.[26]
Arizona State University in 2007 tied the university president's pay to an increase in the school's placement in the U.S. News rankings.[27]
Belmont University president Robert Fisher stated in 2010, "Rising to the Top 5 in U.S. News represents a key element of Belmont's Vision 2015 plan."[28]
During the 1990s, several educational institutions in the United States were involved in a movement to boycott the U.S. News & World Report college rankings survey. The first was Reed College, which stopped submitting the survey in 1995. The survey was also criticized by Alma College, Stanford University, and St. John's College during the late 1990s.[29]SAT scores play a role in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings even though U.S. News is not empowered with the ability to formally verify or recalculate the scores that are represented to them by schools. Since the mid-1990s there have been many instances documented by the popular press wherein schools lied about their SAT scores in order to obtain a higher ranking.[30] An exposé in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the elements in the methodology of U.S. News & World Report are redundant and are driven by financial incentives.[31]
In 2000, the National Opinion Research Center reviewed the methodology, and stated that the weights "lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis".[32] A New York Times article in 2003 likewise reported that, given the U.S. News weighting methodology, "it's easy to guess who's going to end up on top: the Big Three, Harvard, Yale and Princeton round out the first three essentially every year. When asked how he knew his system was sound, Mel Elfin, the rankings' founder, often answered that he knew it because those three schools always landed on top. When a new lead statistician, Amy Graham, changed the formula in 1999 to one she considered more statistically valid, the California Institute of Technology jumped to first place. Ms. Graham soon left, and a modified system pushed Princeton back to No. 1 the next year."[33]
On June 19, 2007, during the annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, members discussed the letter to college presidents asking them not to participate in the "reputation survey" section of the U.S. News & World Report survey (this section comprises 25% of the ranking). As a result, "a majority of the approximately 80 presidents at the meeting said that they did not intend to participate in the U.S. News reputational rankings in the future".[34] The statement also said that its members "have agreed to participate in the development of an alternative common format that presents information about their colleges for students and their families to use in the college search process".[35] This database will be web-based and developed in conjunction with higher-education organizations including theNational Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the Council of Independent Colleges.
On June 22, 2007, U.S. News & World Report editor Robert Morse issued a response in which he argued, "in terms of the peer assessment survey, we at U.S. News firmly believe the survey has significant value because it allows us to measure the 'intangibles' of a college that we can't measure through statistical data. Plus, the reputation of a school can help get that all-important first job and plays a key part in which grad school someone will be able to get into. The peer survey is by nature subjective, but the technique of asking industry leaders to rate their competitors is a commonly accepted practice. The results from the peer survey also can act to level the playing field between private and public colleges".[36]
In reference to the alternative database discussed by the Annapolis Group, Morse also argued, "It's important to point out that the Annapolis Group's stated goal of presenting college data in a common format has been tried before ... U.S. News has been supplying this exact college information for many years already. And it appears that NAICU will be doing it with significantly less comparability and functionality. U.S. News first collects all these data (using an agreed-upon set of definitions from the Common Data Set). Then we post the data on our website in easily accessible, comparable tables. In other words, the Annapolis Group and the others in the NAICU initiative actually are following the lead of U.S. News".[36]
The question of college rankings and their impact on admissions gained greater attention in March 2007, when Sarah Lawrence College outgoing president Michele Tolela Myers, wrote an op-ed[37] that U.S. News & World Report, when not given SAT scores for a university, chooses to simply rank the college with an invented SAT score of approximately one standard deviation, which she estimated was roughly 200 SAT points behind those of peer colleges, reasoning that SAT-optional universities will, because of their test-optional nature, accept higher numbers of less academically capable students.
Some higher education experts, such as Kevin Carey of Education Sector, have asserted that U.S. News & World Report's college rankings system is merely a list of criteria that mirrors the superficial characteristics of elite colleges and universities. According to Carey, the U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity. He suggests that there are more important characteristics parents and students should research to select colleges, such as how well students are learning and how likely students are to earn a degree.[38]
In a 2011 article on the Sarah Lawrence controversy, Peter Sacks of The Huffington Post criticized the U.S. News rankings' centering on test scores and denounced the magazine's "best colleges" list as a scam:[39]
In the U.S. News worldview of college quality, it matters not a bit what students actually learn on campus, or how a college actually contributes to the intellectual, ethical and personal growth of students while on campus, or how that institution contributes to the public good...and then, when you consider that student SAT scores are profoundly correlated [to] parental income and education levels – the social class that a child is born into and grows up with – you begin to understand what a corrupt emperor 'America's Best Colleges' really is. The ranking amounts to little more than a pseudo-scientific and yet popularly legitimate tool for perpetuating inequality between educational haves and have nots – the rich families from the poor ones, and the well-endowed schools from the poorly endowed ones.
The U.S. News college rankings are widely denounced by many higher education experts.[1] Detractors argue that they rely on self-reported, sometimes fraudulent data by the institutions,[2][3][4][5] encourage gamesmanship by institutions looking to improve their rank,[6] imply a false precision by deriving an ordinal ranking from questionable data,[7] contribute to the admissions frenzy by unduly highlighting prestige,[8] and ignore individual fit by comparing institutions with widely diverging missions on the same scale.[9] In 2022, a professor challenged the validity of the rankings saying that he was unable to replicate the results when examining the data.[40]
As of 2023, few undergraduate schools had joined the graduate school exodus that followed Yale's 2022 withdrawal, with The New York Times noting that the status quo reflects a "psychic hold that the rankings have on American higher education, even for the country’s most renowned schools... an easy way to reach and enchant possible applicants..."[51]
Changes to the ranking system, in 2023, following a U.S. News "listening tour" of schools, engaged its critics, which the publication failed to impress with any meaningful reforms.[52]
In June 2023, Columbia University announced their undergraduate schools would no longer participate, following the lead of its law, medical, and nursing schools. A press release cited concerns that such rankings unduly influence applicants and "distill a university’s profile into a composite of data categories." Its undergraduate program had dropped from second to 18th place in the 2022-2023 rankings after February 2022 revelations by Columbia professor Michael Thaddeus[55] that the university had submitted faulty data.[56]
Drexel University is a private research university with its main campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Drexel's undergraduate school was founded in 1891 by Anthony J. Drexel, a financier and philanthropist. Founded as Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry, it was renamed Drexel Institute of Technology in 1936, before assuming its current name in 1970.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a public research university located in the coastal city of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. It has two major campuses, a modern city campus in Gardens Point and a historical campus in Kelvin Grove. The university offers courses in fields including architecture, engineering, information technology, healthcare, teaching, law, arts and design, science and mathematics.
Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant research university based in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the seventh-largest engineering college in the nation for 2023. Undergraduate enrollment for all colleges combined averages over 32,000 while an additional 5,000 students are engaged in post-graduate coursework through the university. In 2023, over 37,000 students were enrolled at OSU – making it the largest university in the state. Out-of-state students typically make up over one-quarter of the student body. Since its founding, over 272,000 students have graduated from OSU. The university is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as an "...R1: Doctoral University," with "...very high research activity."
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national public collegiate and research university in Singapore. It was officially established in 1980 by the merger of the University of Singapore and Nanyang University.
Pepperdine University is a private research university affiliated with the Churches of Christ with its main campus in Los Angeles County, California. Pepperdine's main campus consists of 830 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, California. Founded by entrepreneur George Pepperdine in South Los Angeles in 1937, the school expanded to Malibu in 1972. Courses are now taught at a main Malibu campus, three graduate campuses in Southern California, a center in Washington, D.C., and international campuses in Buenos Aires, Argentina; London, United Kingdom; Heidelberg, Germany; Florence, Italy; and Blonay – Saint-Légier, Switzerland.
U.S. News & World Report is an American media company publishing news, consumer advice, rankings, and analysis. The company was launched in 1948 as the merger of domestic-focused weekly newspaper U.S. News and international-focused weekly magazine World Report. In 1995, the company launched its website, usnews.com and, in 2010, ceased printing its weekly magazine, publishing only its ranking editions in print.
Boston College Law School is the law school of Boston College, a private Jesuit research university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. It is situated on a 40-acre (160,000 m2) campus in Newton, Massachusetts, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the university's main campus in Chestnut Hill.
The University of San Diego (USD) is a private Roman Catholic research university in San Diego, California. Chartered in July 1949 as the independent San Diego College for Women and San Diego University, the two institutions merged in 1972.
California State University, Fullerton is a public research university in Fullerton, California. With a total enrollment of more than 41,000, it has the largest student body of the California State University (CSU) system, and its graduate student body of more than 5,000 is one of the largest in the CSU and in all of California. As of fall 2016, the school had 2,083 faculty, of whom 782 were on the tenure track. The university offers 109 degree programs: 55 undergraduate degrees and 54 graduate degrees, including 3 doctoral programs.
Marquette University is a private Jesuit research university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Established by the Society of Jesus as Marquette College on August 28, 1881, it was founded by John Martin Henni, the first Bishop of the diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Initially an all-male institution, Marquette became the first coeducational Catholic university in the world in 1909.
Guizhou University is a provincial public university located in suburban Guiyang, Guizhou, China. It is affiliated with the Province of Guizhou and is co-funded by the Guizhou Provincial People's Government and the Ministry of Education. The university is part of Project 211 and the Double First-Class Construction.
Law school rankings are a specific subset of college and university rankings dealing specifically with law schools. Like college and university rankings, law school rankings can be based on empirical data, subjectively-perceived qualitative data, or some combination of these. Such rankings are often consulted by prospective students as they choose which schools they will apply to or which school they will attend. There are several different law school rankings, each of which has a different emphasis and methodology.
The Annapolis Group is an American organization of independent liberal arts colleges. It represents approximately 130 liberal arts colleges in the United States. These colleges work together to promote a greater understanding of the goals of a liberal arts education through their websites, as well as through independent research. Its current chair is Stephen D. Schutt, the president of Lake Forest College.
Criticism of college and university rankings refers to critiques of various rankings publications among faculty and administrators in institutions of higher education in both the United States and Canada, as well as in media reports.
The Education Conservancy is an American educational non-profit organization headed by director Lloyd Thacker. It describes its goal as being "committed to improving college admission processes for students, colleges and high schools."
Liberal arts colleges in the United States are undergraduate institutions of higher education in the United States that focus on a liberal arts education. The Encyclopædia Britannica Concise defines liberal arts as a "college or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum". Generally, a full-time, four-year course of study at a liberal arts college leads students to earning the Bachelor of Arts or the Bachelor of Science.
The University of Rhode Island (URI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Kingston, Rhode Island, United States. It is the flagship public research as well as the land-grant university of Rhode Island. The university is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". As of 2019, the URI enrolled 14,653 undergraduate students, 1,982 graduate students, and 1,339 non-degree students, making it the largest university in the state.
College and university rankings in the United States order the best U.S. colleges and universities based on factors that vary depending on the ranking. Rankings are typically conducted by magazines, newspapers, websites, governments, or academics. In addition to ranking entire institutions, specific programs, departments, and schools can be ranked. Some rankings consider measures of wealth, excellence in research, selective admissions, and alumni success. There is also much debate about rankings' interpretation, accuracy, and usefulness.
Rankings of universities in Canada are typically published annually by a variety of nationally, and internationally based publications. Rankings of post-secondary institutions have most often been conducted by magazines, newspapers, websites, governments, or academia. Ranking are established to help inform potential applicants about universities in Canada based on a range of criteria, including student body characteristics, classes, faculty, finances, library, and reputation. Various rankings consider combinations of factors, including funding and endowment, research excellence and/or influence, specialization expertise, admissions, student options, award numbers, internationalization, graduate employment, industrial linkage, historical reputation and other criteria. Various rankings also evaluate universities based on research output.
1 2 Gnolek, Shari L.; Falciano, Vincenzo T.; Kuncl, Ralph W. (2014). "Modeling Change and Variation in U.S. News & World Report College Rankings: What would it really take to be in the Top 20?". Research in Higher Education. 55 (8): 761–779. doi:10.1007/s11162-014-9336-9. S2CID144016491.
1 2 Bowman, Nicholas A. and Bastedo, Michael N. (2009). "Getting on the Front Page: Organizational Reputation, Status Signals, and the Impact of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on Student Decisions" personal.umich.edu Retrieved June 29, 2010.
↑ Bastedo, Michael N. and Bowman, Nicholas A. (2010). "The U.S. News & World Report College Rankings: Modeling Institutional Effects on Organizational Reputation" personal.umich.edu Retrieved June 29, 2010.
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