Since the creation of the U.S. News & World Report rankings in 1983, prospective college students have looked to the rankings to navigate the myriad of opportunities available to them.
But there there have been people who disagree with the schools that are described as "America's Best" every year. Although U.S. News has continually refined its methodology throughout the years in an attempt to be as accurate and subjective as possible, many critics still dismiss the rankings as inaccurate.
Elon University has fared particularly well on U.S. News' list. Elon ranked No. 2 in regional universities in the Southeast. and has also been rated the No. 1 "School to Watch," a statistic that the university showcases on its website.
"We have an amazing reputation, we keep hearing from our higher education colleagues that Elon is doing many innovative things very well," said Susan Klopman, vice president of admissions and financial planning. "We have built a pretty big national footprint rather quickly. Schools are pretty amazed at the breadth and speed and quality of what we are doing. In a time of budget cuts for most schools, we are moving forward."
Some colleges, unsatisfied with US News' method, have opted out of the rankings entirely. Schools may opt out of the rankings by refusing to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey and 78 schools opted out this year. In 2007, The Education Conservancy sent a letter to hundreds of college presidents encouraging them to opt out of the rankings, calling the rankings "misleading."
Questionable methodology
One portion of the rankings has raised a number of eyebrows in particular. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell said the reputational ratings portion of the rankings was based on "prejudices." The section, called "peer assessment," is the most heavily weighted portion of the rankings. U.S. News scores each school in this category using a relatively simple method —surveys. Every year, U.S. News sends out surveys to admissions counselors, deans, presidents and provosts at institutions around the country.
The participants are given a list of as many as 100 schools that are in the same ranking category as their own. These categories are created from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The respondents go down a list of schools, scoring each on a scale of one to five, with one being "marginal" and five being "distinguished."
Recently, U.S. News also began sending surveys to high school counselors, asking them to do the same rankings as the college administrators.
Of the 4,580 academics that were sent questionnaires, 43 percent responded. The high school counselors' survey response rate was 13.4 percent, according to the U.S. News' website.
A cursory reading of this methodology sounds an alarm to many people about its efficacy.
"We can't possibly know all these schools enough to assess them," Klopman said. "There's a lot of room for variability among this category. To a large extent, there is a lot of opinion involved. From the perspective of many faculty, the surveys are contrary to what they would see as good methods or research."
Klopman was one of several administrators from Elon who participated in the survey last year. She said she was only able to rank just 10 percent of the schools that were on the list. For the other 90 percent, she circled "don't know."
Dan Anderson, vice president of university communications, also expressed reservation about the peer assessment portion of the rankings.
"I think that reputation score is more weighted than it should be," he said. "And I think that most people in higher education would agree with me."
A strong influence
The U.S. News rankings have grown to be hugely influential, especially in the past decade. Each year, the release of the rankings coincides with millions of hits on its website. In 2007, within three days of releasing the rankings, the website received 10 million views, compared to the normal 500,000 views in a typical month.
The rankings, according to Klopman, have grown in importance during the last decade in particular.
"The Web exploded college knowledge like nothing else in our history," she said. "Ten or 15 years ago, you may have known about five schools that you knew about for your interests, now you can research thousands of schools online. All this information has created the need for third party endorsements. Who says if a given school is good? Who says they're doing well?"
More importantly, the rankings have proven to be a strong influence on the quality of applicants for schools on the list. In 2009, Michael Bastedo, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and Nicholas Bowman, an assistant professor of education at Bowling Green State University, published a study about the effect that the rankings had on students' decision making for college choices.
The authors examined the effect of a given school's ranking on the U.S. News list on each school's applicant pool for the following year. They focused in particular on the top 50 ranked schools for 1997-2004 and the effects the rankings had for the applicant pool from 1998-2005. They found some clear indications that the rankings, particularly for those schools in the top 25, had a significant impact on the types of students that applied to those schools. The authors controlled for other admissions factors, so the effects of the rankings could be isolated.
For example, for all institutions, getting on to the front page resulted in a 2.3 percent increase in the proportion of incoming freshmen that graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. For national universities, which include schools like Harvard and Yale, moving into the top 25 led to a stronger, 3.9 percent increase in the proportion of students in the top tenth of their high school class. Moving up just a single spot in the top tier of the national university rankings also led to a 1.5 percent increase in total number of applications.
Elon freshman Grant Stimmel said he used the rankings to eliminate some schools while he was searching for colleges last year.
"If a school I was interested in was ranked really low, I would eliminate it," he said.
But Stimmel also said if two schools were both highly rated, he did not base his decision on which was slightly higher on the list.
"If one school was ranked two and the other was three, I wouldn't choose the school ranked two based only on U.S. News," he said.