It’s at this time each year that US News and World Report releases its updated “Best Colleges” rankings. It’s also at this time of year, us professionals in the college counseling world cringe because we know how many students and parents view these rankings. First, I want to point out that there are benefits to evaluating and understanding rankings. I am not saying that rankings are bad or wrong. US News and World Report uses a number of metrics to determine where a college ranks in their list and I am sure they are doing this accurately. As the consumer, someone who will be applying to colleges this fall or in the future, I strongly recommend viewing these rankings with skepticism and here are a number of reasons why.
- There is a lot of “gaming” that goes on to stay on top of the rankings.
Let me give you a couple examples. If one of the key metrics is admission rate and the lower it is the better, colleges will find ways to get more students to apply so that they can deny more students. Even when they have the opportunity to control how many applicants they get, they do their best to get more applicants so they can get their admission rate down. If another key metric is graduate indebtedness, students and parents may say, “look at this school whose graduates come out with such little debt even though the tuition is $60,000”. A lot of the colleges at the top of the rankings, however, will give a lot of need based grants and scholarships to low income students and many other students that attend the top colleges come from high income families who are paying the entire bill. There are not many middle income students who decide to take $80,000-$120,000 in school loans because those students most likely received a lot of merit based scholarship money at another “good” college. I could give an explanation like this for other metrics as well.
2. Rankings give the false impression that there is a pecking order of colleges.
If you read through any college rankings and form an opinion that you should apply to one college over another because of a higher or lower ranking, than you are ignoring the real reason you should apply to a college to begin with, because it’s a good fit for YOU. Deciding to apply to a college just because it’s ranked higher frustrates us who work in the college admission world because a student is not at all considering that college for any of the right reasons (academics, size, location, major interest, extracurricular opportunities, Christian/secular, etc.). What these rankings also do is give the impression that there are only 50 “good” or “best” colleges when there are actually hundreds of really great schools in the United States.
3. Rankings encourage students and parents to ignore financial fit
Seniors should not only apply to colleges that are a great fit for them based on the factors mentioned above, but they should also apply to colleges that are a good “financial fit” for them. For the reason I stated in #1 above, one who reads these rankings may think that “I won’t have much debt when I get out so these colleges are also affordable”. However, the colleges that are at the top of the rankings are typically the most expensive in the country. The can choose to charge more because they know students and parents will pay more to attend their school. They then convince themselves to pay more because they think attending this higher ranked school will provide more job opportunities after they graduate. While I am not saying that there can be networking opportunities at a higher ranked school and there are companies out there that may pay attention to where a student went to college, this is not the majority and way more students in this country attend colleges that are ranked #50 or lower than those who do. Seniors should be applying to colleges in which they know they will get merit based scholarships and many colleges at the top of the rankings do not award merit scholarships.
I want to end by saying that attending a college that is ranked at or near the top of US News and World Report Best Colleges rankings is not a negative. If you think that one of these colleges is a great fit for you after evaluating all aspects of the college and what it experience it will provide you, by all means, apply and I hope you have great success. The colleges at the top of the rankings definitely provide great academic experiences and amazing opportunities. The unfortunate thing, though, is that many apply to these highly ranked colleges thinking that they have to in order to be “successful”. This is completely not true and just leads to frustration and undue stress in the college application process. If you need a start to see that there are hundreds of great colleges out there, get Princeton Reviews “The Best 386 Colleges” book.
Other resources that you should read and listen to on this topic are:
15 Reasons To Ignore US News and World Report Rankings
Do College Rankings Really Reveal The Best Colleges?
Inside the Methodology of College Rankings (Part 1)
