The Story Behind the Rankings
Sometimes I worry that we're getting a little too popular over here at untrendy U.S. News. We've gotten quite a bit of attention over the past several months on our ranking of America's Best Colleges. Maybe you've seen some of the stories. The heads of a few liberal arts colleges have tried to organize a boycott of the rankings and received a lot of press coverage. They've accused us of all manner of sins, including oversimplifying complex institutions and, in one memorable quote, of exuding "real evil."
I take their point, except the evil part. The rankings aren't perfect, and every school has a unique character that is best explored in person. We're always looking for ways to get better information, and I'm the first to caution anyone not to make too much of top 10 lists. But, sorry to say, we don't produce the rankings for college presidents. We publish them for our readers, who've told us for more than 20 years that they find them very helpful when it comes to trying to make sense of a higher education system that is extremely expensive and largely unaccountable.
We're journalists—not social scientists, academic accreditors, or the Department of Education. We gather facts and do our best to explain what they mean. Sometimes we write stories; sometimes we put numbers in tables. For any of our rankings, we start by making sure we get the numbers right. Then we weight them in a formula that, in the case of colleges, is based on discussions with educators, parents, and students about what matters. The recipe isn't a secret: It's there for all to see in the magazine and in more detail at usnews.com.
I would like to think that the first reason we're popular is that we have a hard-earned reputation for accuracy. Each rankings issue is based on many thousands of data points, and very rarely do we get one wrong. In fact, U.S. News over the years has been the most important force in prodding colleges to make their own data more accurate and to come up with standard ways of reporting crucial information.
We work to keep the colleges honest—and the overwhelming majority are. New federal reporting requirements and other sources mean that we can vet the college-provided information. Even if a few schools don't want to cooperate, we have other ways to get the information and rank them (the proposed boycott had little or no effect on our surveys this year).
Our goal is to be accessible to everyone. A smart kid in an overcrowded public school gets the same shot at our basic information as a prep school kid with a personal guidance counselor. And we're looking at all 1,400 major accredited schools, not just the elite few that other college guides emphasize. In fact, far from promoting elitism—as we're sometimes accused of doing—the U.S. News rankings have helped expand the universe of top schools way beyond the Ivies. If you don't believe me, just ask places like Duke, Rice, Washington University in St. Louis, and Emory.
Then there's cost. The soaring price tag of college is a major cause of parental anxiety. Couple that with the American consumer's increasing desire for hard information he can use to make decisions, and the rankings—whether colleges, grad schools, hospitals, or other subjects we have in the works—become an essential resource. Given the various woes of higher ed, most notably the really slimy financial aid scandal (a story, by the way, that U.S. News first started reporting on four years ago), I was genuinely puzzled as to why these presidents were suddenly focusing so much attention on our rankings. If I were selling a product that cost as much as a house, had murky price information, and offered no way to measure what you got for your money, I might be worried that folks would stop buying. But that's their business. Our business is to make it easier to find your way through an expensive maze.
Could the rankings be better? Yes. The major limit is the data that are available.
There's a real hunger for output measures (except, perhaps, on the part of some colleges): What did students learn? Can they meet a minimum test standard? What kind of jobs did they get after graduation? But there's no standard way to gather that information right now.
And, yes, there's some unfortunate overreaction. Some folks make more of the rankings than they should. The difference between No. 10 and No. 23 is not that great. It's just one tool, one way to look at a complicated universe of schools and choices.
But if the Harvard alums want to argue that their Princeton brethren are way overrated, we don't see any harm in that. It might keep them away from the kind of mischief those Ivy League grads sometimes get into, like inventing new subprime mortgage loans or rigging the college financial aid system.
This story appears in the August 27, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.