U.S. News & World Report released recently the results of what it said was the most substantive overhaul of its 40-year-old college rankings empire in the country.
At the top, there were few changes as Princeton remained the United States’ top-ranked university, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Harvard and Stanford tied for third. Williams maintained its stature as the nation’s top liberal arts college and Spelman College again led among historically Black institutions.
But more than a dozen public universities, many of them with relatively low profiles, climbed at least 50 spots in the rankings. Fresno State moved up 64 places, to No. 185, for instance, and Florida Atlantic ascended 53 spots, to No. 209. Many other public institutions recorded smaller, if quite notable, gains, including Rutgers, which saw each of its three campuses rise by at least 15 places.
They benefited from an algorithm that sent some private universities’ rankings plummeting but represented an effort to account for deals that higher education leaders routinely talk up, such as transforming the lives of economically disadvantaged students.
The reworked formula assigned greater emphasis to graduation rates for students who received need-based Pell grants and retention. It also introduced metrics tied to first-generation college students and to whether recent graduates were earning noticeably more than people who had completed only high school.
The most seismic changes involved schools that were not at the extreme ends of the previous rankings, since they were not extraordinarily weak or strong across a sweeping array of criteria. Occupying the ranking’s middle rungs meant that shifts in methodology, such as the removal of alumni donation as a criterion, could easily fuel dramatic rises and falls.
It was unclear, however, how much the overhaul would reduce criticism of U.S. News. Schools have said that the rankings have an outsize influence on students and parents, who use them as a proxy for prestige. And critics say they can skew the priorities of colleges and how they admit students.
L. Song Richardson, president of Colorado College, said the refreshed methodology was “slightly better”. The liberal arts school said in February that it would stop submitting information to U.S. News.
“It doesn’t ease my concerns, which is why we haven’t rejoined,” said Richardson, whose institution fell two spots, to No. 29, among liberal arts colleges. “But certainly I’m thrilled that they’re starting to listen to what higher ed leaders have been saying to them.”
Even if some public universities such as Fresno State benefited this year, many university leaders recoil at the idea of ranking colleges as if educations are mass-produced consumer products. Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, complained in a 2021 opinion piece in The Washington Post that “the rankings game is a bit of mishegoss — a slightly daft obsession that does harm when colleges, parents or students take it too seriously”.
Anointing any one university as “best”, he added, was “bizarre”.
Universities that soared welcomed their new rankings nevertheless. Antonio Tillis, chancellor of the Rutgers campus in Camden, New Jersey, said that officials were “ecstatic” and that the rise “reflects an intentional dedication to access and affordability, student success, academic excellence and constituency engagement”.
U.S. News relies on proprietary formulas for its far-reaching, for-profit rankings business, which scores everything from mutual funds to pediatric gastroenterology services. The publisher’s college rankings are widely seen as America’s most influential,
and administrators, however philosophically hostile they might be to rankings, often embrace them as marketing tools. For the most part, even universities whose law or medical schools vowed in recent months to stop sharing information with U.S. News contributed data about their many undergraduate programmes.
Eric Gertler, U.S. News’ executive chair, emphatically denied that the publisher had made any adjustments in its formula to try to retain the support of universities. U.S. News had said it would rank schools whether they provided information or not.
The company discarded five factors that often favoured wealthy colleges and together made up 18 per cent of a school’s score, including undergraduate class sizes, alumni-giving rates and high school class standing.
This year’s formula, which relied more on data sources beyond submissions by schools, also gave less weight to overall graduation rates and financial resources per student, which examines how much, on average, a university spends per student on costs such as instruction and research.
Private universities proved particularly vulnerable to the new formula. Small class size, which was 8 per cent of a score a year ago, is a matter of pride for many elite institutions. Its disappearance from the U.S. News algorithm played a role in some top schools’ rankings tumbling.
NYTNS
Last updated on 17 Oct 2023
