The Truth About College Rankings

We love rankings! We rank everything from refrigerators to automobiles and hotels to sports. The rankings shape our decisions and justify our purchases. Even more importantly, the rankings supposedly inform us on which products to avoid. Consumer Reports, Wall Street Journal, and Tom’s Guide, to name a few, all spend tremendous resources to publish their best to worst-lists. And although my letter today is about the college ranking industry, even at Posnack School, we promote our Niche lofty ranking as a top private JrK – 12th grade. The ranking industry is a mammoth industry and a billion-dollar business with severe consequences if not played correctly.

College Rankings 

Within the ranking industry, there is one category that has one of the most influential effects on our children’s lives – The U.S. News and World Report Rankings of Best Colleges in America. Every year, 12th graders across the country look up where on the list their college of interest ranks. A lofty ranking is seen as a more favorable sign to perhaps apply Early Decision (ED), and a lower ranking might mean not to apply at all. When high school seniors were surveyed about which factors they used to determine which colleges to apply to, the U.S News and World Report Rankings of Best Colleges in America was in the top five. And the U.S. News’ publishers are aware of how much influence their college rankings have on the public. 

Within 72 hours of the release of its 2007 Best College Rankings, the US News website received 10 million hits, compared to its normal count of 500,000 page views per month. By 2009, it experienced 15 million page views the day the college rankings came out. By 2019, 29 million visitors viewed the release of its college ranking within days of its release.  All of those views translate into lots of money for what was once a failing publication. 

How it Started 

The college rankings industry started in 1983 when a failing weekly news magazine, U.S. News and World Report, first published its “Best Colleges” list. The list was generated by a peer-reputation survey sent to 1,308 college presidents. The college presidents were asked to select up to 10 schools they thought were the best at providing an undergraduate education. Approximately half of the presidents responded. Based on their responses, US News ranked 25 national universities and 25 national liberal arts colleges. That first ranking declared Stanford University as the best national university and Amherst as the best national liberal arts college.

At the time, most parents and high school students viewed the rankings with curiosity, but one man saw it as a financial gold mine. His name was Mortimer Zuckerman, a real estate developer and magazine publisher who, in 1984, bought US News and World Report. Under the leadership of Zuckerman and his editor, Mel Elfin, the magazine went from a failure to a rousing success story – mostly because of its college rankings.

In 1989, five of the top 25 national universities were public. By 2019, there were only three. The rankings of colleges in the top 25 are almost always private, and that reality existed from the very beginning of the rankings and continues today. It’s interesting to note that the rankings continue to have a large influence on aspiring college students, even though they are heavily skewed towards private colleges and despite the fact that 80 percent of American college students attend a public university. 

The Ranking Formula 

Since 1990, the US News College Rankings’ formula has been tinkered with numerous times. It has added new indicators to the formula, dropped others, and altered the weights assigned to different factors. For example, in 1996, it added first-year retention and graduation rates to its formula. In 2004, it ceased using yield rates in its student selectivity metric. In 2018, it included social mobility, and in 2021, student debt. In 2020, it dropped the opinions of high school college counselors in the rankings.

The US News College Rankings’ formula does include spending per student, faculty salaries, graduation rates, and acceptance rates. In 2021, US News used a six-year graduation rate factor with a weight of 17.6 percent of its overall formula. The freshman-to-sophomore year retention rate carries a 4.4 percent weight in its formula, and a college’s freshman class average SAT score explains 12 percent of a college’s ranking.

Even though the US News College Rankings’ formula kept changing, for the most part, the same colleges remained in the top 25. For those colleges outside of that top tier, there was frustration, and a reality that there was little one could do to raise where they were ranked. That’s where Richard Freeland entered the picture and sent shockwaves through the college ranking industry. 

Moving to a Higher Ranking 

Richard Freeland was president of Northeastern University from 1996 to 2006. In 1996, the University was under tremendous financial pressure and programmatic cutbacks. At the time, it was ranked 162nd in the US News list of national colleges. President Freeland was tasked with turning around Northeastern’s troubles, and his focus to do that was by improving Northeastern’s ranking. President Freeland made it his goal for Northeastern to break into the top 100 colleges. He invested in new campus facilities, raised faculty salaries, and went around the country raising awareness of Northeastern. Over time, his efforts started to pay off. Between 1996 and 2023, Northeastern’s college ranking steadily soared from 162 to 44th! Northeastern’s freshman applications also soared with the higher rankings – from 30,000 applications in 2007 to over 100,000 applications in 2023. That’s an increase of over 200%! While there are many factors considered by high school students when choosing to apply to a college, it’s not a coincidence that Northeastern’s incredible increase in freshman applications coincided with its meteoric rise in the US News ranking. 

Northeastern University is not alone in making the US News College Rankings the biggest driver of improving a college’s perceived prestige. When Kent Fuchs became president of the University of Florida, he was directed by the University to raise Florida’s ranking to become a top five national public university in the country. T-shirts were made that proudly stated the “Drive for Top 5.” Donors were cultivated to help support raising Florida’s ranking, and communication after communication to alumni asked them to share in this joint effort. Again, with a strategic plan and a relentless pursuit of the goal, the University of Florida’s ranking went from 48th to 29th overall and tied with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as a top five public national university in the country. 

There are other examples, including Boston University rising from 56th to 42nd, and the University of Pennsylvania moved after being stuck in the mid-teens when President Judith Rodin took over and got Penn to as high as 4th in 2005.

The Higher Ranking Impact 

The impact the rankings have on high school students every time a college increases its ranking almost always coincides with the number of freshman applicants skyrocketing. And increasing the number of freshman applications improves a college’s perceived reputation – and that’s very good for business for a college’s undergraduate and graduate programs. 

After Yale became ranked the number one law school in the country, its matriculation rate went up 80 percent. In 2006, when the University of Chicago was ranked 15th, the University’s new president, Robert Zimmer, made it a goal to increase its ranking. The result – freshman applications ballooned from 9,100 in 2006 to 34,600 in 2020, and its acceptance rate went from 40 percent to 6 percent. Chicago was rewarded for all that effort by moving to a number three ranking in 2020.

With all of these ranking changes and college presidents making a targeted effort to specifically increase their own ranking, the question becomes, does a university’s higher ranking actually mean the college is better than before?

Do Higher Rankings Mean a Better College? 

The truth is that many of the efforts to raise their US News College rankings at colleges like Northeastern University, the University of Florida, and the University of Pennsylvania did bring new facilities to their campuses and new programs that might otherwise never have existed. But there is also another part to this answer that needs to be considered if all these efforts to raise a college’s rankings are worth it. 

Part of the US News College Rankings’ formula includes average dollars spent per student – all of their students. That means that if a college wants to “game the system” of raising its undergraduate college ranking by spending more per student, the college could invest in its law school students, and that investment would be applied to all of its students for the US News College Rankings’ formula. The formula rewards all spending – for undergraduates and graduates – including spending that has no direct impact on an undergraduate’s college experience. 

There are other examples of how a college uses the US News College Rankings formula in its favor. The rankings only consider the incoming fall semester freshman class SAT or ACT averages and not a student admitted in the spring or summer. But a student’s overall college experience will include students who matriculate into the college at different points, so to assume that a college’s prestige is correlated exclusively to an incoming freshman class’s SAT or ACT scores is not an accurate assumption. 

As discussed above, we also know that a college can directly increase its application pool just by focusing on increasing its ranking. By doing this, a college maintaining the same raw number of accepted students in its freshmen class can significantly lower its acceptance rate and thus end up increasing its perceived prestige. Does increasing a college’s total number of applications in order to lower its percentage acceptance rate mean a college is offering a better undergraduate experience than before? It’s debatable at best. 

Pursuing a Higher Ranking Can Lead to Poor Institutional Behavior 

All of these high stakes with a college ranking have resulted in some poor college behavior. Clemson University “manipulated” class size data and boosted data on its average faculty salaries. Bucknell University submitted inaccurate SAT scores. Emory University furnished test-score data for admitted students rather than actual enrolled ones. The University of Oklahoma supplied inaccurate data to US News for twenty years, and Columbia University was recently called out by one of its professors for reporting inaccurate data that just happened to coincide with Columbia’s rise as the 2nd best university ranking in America. US News punished Columbia by dropping its ranking from a lofty #2 down to #18. Putting the controversy aside, did the quality of a Columbia undergraduate experience change that much to go from #2 to #18? 

It’s a Big Business 

As you can see, the college ranking industry is a big business. In fact, the entire recruitment of high school students to college is big business. For example, in 2006, the College Board (which runs the SAT and APs) sold 60 million student prospect names to colleges. By 2010, 80 million names were sold even though only 5.2 million students took the SAT and PSAT that year. Student names are sold, on average, 18 times over their high school career, and some names are purchased more than 70 times at a cost of 45 cents per name. Cornell University wants to buy teenager names who come from households with an income of over $200,000. Tulane University wants the names of students who have expressed an interest in the humanities. High school teenagers get flooded with all these mailings from colleges that bought their names. These mailings are a big business, and our children are in the middle of it. 

New Anti-Ranking Movement 

There is a recent movement gaining traction among prestigious law schools across the country to no longer submit their data to US News. Berkeley, Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford law schools just recently joined Harvard and Yale law schools for rejecting US News rankings. Administrators from those law schools are stating that the rankings are no longer in line with their schools’ values. Yale Law School Dean Heather K. Gerken called the rankings “profoundly flawed.” Even though law schools are taking notice of the rankings’ flaws, right now, undergraduate programs have not yet joined the law school movement to reject the rankings. But this remains a fluid situation that is still evolving. 

Are Rankings Worth It?

So, for now, US News (along with other publishers’ college rankings) remains a prolific business that has an immense impact on our children and the college application process. For decades, this influence has happened without the public really understanding what truly comprises how the rankings are compiled and the influence the annual rankings have on everything from college spending to the number of freshman applications. 

In the end, all of us have a choice to make as to how much value we give to the rankings in the first place. Do we consider a college’s ranking as a main indicator of prestige? Should our teenagers use the annual rankings as a factor in determining where they should apply to college and spend their next four years? There is no right or wrong answer to these questions. But it’s helpful to consider the rules of this game before determining what value (or not) you give the college rankings. Brian Kelley, the U.S. News editor, once said, “You can love us or hate us, but we’re not going away.” He’s probably right, but the truth is that answer is really up to us to decide.  

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. Richard Cuenca 
Head of School 

PS: Thank you to all of our incredible Posnack School families for believing in the Posnack Way! We are humbled and filled with gratitude by the outpouring of love and support shown during our recent matching campaign. May we always go from strength to strength and only know of health and prosperity.