What You Should Know About College Rankings

Niche. U.S. News & World Report. Forbes. These are just a few of the websites that publish college rankings annually, promising that the institutions on the top of their lists are the best of the best. However, as simple as reading that this college is #1 and that college is #7 may seem, college rankings often aren’t that straightforward or even genuine. Below are some truths about college rankings that you should know before taking them at face value.

1. Rankings are often highly subjective. What truly makes a “better” college? When it comes to these “Top 10s,” it’s essentially up to the rankers to express their own opinions on the matter—opinions that might not align with yours. Usually these rankings do cover factors of interest to college applicants, such as average financial aid offered and academic rigor; but the rankings also gloss over other essential aspects, such as average student debt, or factor in aspects that don’t directly relate to undergraduate experience, such as alumni endowments or professor research. Before taking the rankings for truth, check the criteria that are being used to rank the institutions in the first place, and research the colleges for your personal priorities if you find the rankings lacking.

2. They can be based on too many factors to be completely reliable. Graduation rate, freshman satisfaction, selectivity—so much goes into college rankings, and balancing every factor simultaneously to perfectly decide which college gets to be #5 and which gets to be #6 is well nigh impossible. This problem mainly lies in more holistic (and thus often vague) rankings, such as “Top 10 Colleges in the U.S.” When it comes to a more quantifiable list or a single-variable judgment, like “Top 10 Colleges with Highest Standardized Test Scores” or “10 Colleges with the Smallest Faculty-to-Student Ratio,” the ranking’s reliability increases. But when evaluating colleges holistically, every college has its own strengths and weaknesses, and while some certainly have more strengths than others, rankers have to parse through many different qualities and make the difficult, imperfect choice to prioritize one strength over another.

3. Colleges want to improve their ranking, which can greatly (and sometimes, negatively) influence their admissions process. For example, college rankings generally favor factors like high average SAT/ACT scores or selectivity. This incentivizes institutions to accept more wealthy students with access to standardized test prep or to encourage many students to apply with no intention of accepting them, all in the name of raising their stats, and thus, their ranking. Another example here is considering average class size. Schools can schedule very early morning and inconveniently timed classes with few students to drag their average class size down, while most students will attend 300+ student classes in large auditoriums. Colleges play the rankings like a game—be wary and don’t run into that game blindly.

4. Sites and news sources have ulterior motives. Rankings attract visitors, readers, and subscribers to websites, and these websites know that full well. Although hardly a nefarious motivation, this means that the websites’ interests are not necessarily your interests. While you might be checking the rankings to honestly figure out what college is the “better” college, the site itself may not be as concerned with the accuracy of its own ranking judgments and more interested in retaining your interest in its content.

5. It can be a popularity contest. You’re no doubt well familiar with the names of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among others. These colleges are known worldwide, and are constantly declared the most desirable and beneficial schools to attend, and chances are you’ve noticed these same Ivy League schools standing at the top of the rankings (albeit in varying orders). These institutions have good reputations in the eyes of their peer institutions’ college administrators too, to whom rankers often go for opinions on the colleges they’re ranking. While these college administrators probably know the ins-and-outs of most Ivy League schools and would thus be unparalleled in their knowledge of those institutions, it’s highly unlikely that they would know much about the quality of less well-known colleges. Yet their uninformed opinions on these colleges are taken seriously by the rankers anyway, and so those lesser-known colleges’ rankings suffer. A more obscure college is not a worse one, and it has the full potential to be highly ranked—but not when popularity is in play. 

All in all, certain rankings are genuinely useful and straightforward (i.e. quantitative measurements like affordability or average profile of students typically admitted, which can be used to assess your own chances), but when it comes to the general claim of “which is the better college,” rankings can be misleading. What really makes a 5th place college in the rankings better than a 24th or 73rd? Is there much difference between 30th place and 9th? Regardless of rankings, which college is really better for you? Don’t let the rankings answer these questions for you before you try to answer them yourself; do your own research and set up your own criteria for a good college. The most important thing, after all, is to find colleges that fit your criteria and fit your educational goals best. Use college rankings as a reference point for your own judgments, not as an absolute.