U.S. News Best Colleges Rankings Considerations
Last Updated on September 18, 2023 by Jill Schwitzgebel
This year, the U.S. News list covers 1,620 colleges and universities, broken down into close to fifty different types of lists, some general and some more specific. They evaluate what they consider to be 19 measures of academic quality.
The Methodology
Their rankings all originate with a survey which gets distributed to all eligible colleges (colleges that award at least bachelor’s degree and are regionally accredited). Colleges then self-report their own data on the survey. Like last year, not all colleges that received the survey, completed it, dropping to only an 80% completion rate, with some of the usual top ranked colleges refusing to complete it. If you’re wondering how seriously colleges take the U.S. News rankings, you can look at their strategic plans. At 100 of the largest universities, 25% of them mention these rankings in their current strategic plan. Rumor has it that some universities actually have an employee just dedicated to working on this survey, as it is quite detailed.
U.S. News then goes back to cross check the data they have been given, using various other sources. The methodology and weighting process that they use is long, but can be found here, if you’re interested. In fact, I would recommend reading methodology of ANY college rankings list you’re consulting. This methodology is why you’ll note that various publications all differ in their order of their rankings. It all just depends on the factors that they are using for evaluation and how much weight they give to each of them.
Factors U.S. News specifically considers include things like selectivity in admissions, reputation among other colleges and among high school guidance counselors and graduation rate. They weight each factor differently. For instance they weight reputation among peer institutions fairly heavily. One major criticism recently is how heavily they weight SAT and ACT scores, especially given that almost all colleges are now test-optional For colleges that are test-blind (they won’t consider scores for admission, at all), for the second year in a row, U.S. News punished these schools by assigning them “a rankings value equal to the lowest test score in their rankings.” This year, they dropped several factors and their corresponding weights from their formula: class size (8%), the proportion of a school’s faculty with terminal degrees (3%), alumni giving rate (3%), the proportion of graduates borrowing (2%) and high school class standing (2%).
A valid criticism that has been leveled at these particular rankings is that they have become so popular that some colleges appear to be making their decision about whether or not to remain test-optional or test-blind based on how U.S. News treats those categories. My own pet peeve is how heavily they weight the peer assessment survey (20%). Professors and administrators really can’t claim to know the strengths of 1,600 colleges across the country – and in fact only 30% of them even responded to the survey this year! Yet it’s given outsize consideration in this rankings list. There’s a good chance that a dean in Maryland may not really know much at all about a small college in Washington state.
Some schools that complete the survey by U.S. News don’t even make their published list. The reasons for that vary. Some schools are so specialized in their discipline that they are ineligible and others are too small. Some didn’t have six year graduation rates for first-time students available.
How Much Should I Care about Rankings?
There is no easy answer to that question. It is similar to the question “What is a good SAT score?” The answer will always be, “That depends on the student and their goals.” These rankings are simply quantitative information about a school and can’t give a student information about what a college is really like; what it feels like to be on that campus. So it’s important to not just look at a school’s ranking. It’s important to visit campus whenever possible, talk to students, ask questions, gather information about the school from as many sources as you can find.
The U.S. News and World Report rankings are so popular that you can bet that the schools that scored well in any of the 50 categories will showcase it in their marketing materials. But, they are really just one tool in your college search process. Ultimately, I would say the ranking of a school that you’re interested in is just one more data point to consider among a school’s many other characteristics. Just because a college happens to be number one on a rankings list doesn’t automatically make the school right for your student. Besides, that number one may change next year, anyhow.
See also: Finding a College Fit
Rankings Changes
One thing that has become obvious over the years is that there is relatively little movement in the upper categories of the national rankings. We are talking about highly selective schools and they have a vested interest in maintaining their place on these lists. So, absent major change in the way they are evaluated, large institutions are not going to move much. These schools do surely take note of a change in either direction though. Occasionally two of them will switch places or one school will make steady progress up in the rankings. It’s important to remember that this listing is best considered relatively. And a lower rank from last year does not mean that a school’s quality suddenly declined in one year. It could be that the methodology being used was changed ever so slightly, resulting in a different result than years past. Now, if there is a downward trend for a school over several years, that may be worth investigating.
Perhaps the biggest change to this list in recent years, was when they changed the way they consider the SAT and ACT in rankings back in 2021. As colleges have become overwhelmingly test optional, the methodology regarding test scores has also had to change. This year, they assessed schools on their fall 2022 SAT/ACT scores if they were reported for half or more of new students. If not:
“For schools reporting SAT/ACT on less than 50% of both their fall 2022 and fall 2021 entering classes – including test-blind schools – we did not assess them on standardized tests at all. Instead, for those schools we increased the weights of graduation rates an additional five percentage points, from 16% to 21%. This substitute was chosen because it was the statistic from the rankings formula that correlated closest to standardized tests. “
Rankings
Here are the top results in a few categories. The top five remain unchanged from last year and there was slight re-shuffling in numbers six to ten, with Brown entering the mix. For the full rankings, go to U.S.News and World Report Best College Rankings Online. In the Liberal Arts category, the US Naval Academy shifted ahead several spots to number three and the US Air Force academy hit the top ten. And once again, I’ll remind you, there are very few differences between number one and number 10…or even number 20!
National Universities
1. Princeton University
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Harvard University, Stanford University (tie)
5. Yale University (tie)
6. University of Pennsylvania
7. California Institute of Technology, Duke University (tie)
9. Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University (tie)
National Liberal Arts Colleges
1. Williams College
2. Amherst College
3. U.S. Naval Academy
4. Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Wellesley College (tie)
7. US Air Force Academy
8. US Military Academy at West Point
9. Bowdoin College, Carleton College (tie)
A+ Schools for B Students
(Interestingly, there has been a lot of movement in and out of this group in the last several years)
1. Michigan State University
2. Marquette University
3. University of South Florida
4. University of Iowa
5. Iowa State University
6. Iowa State University of Science and Technology
7. Florida International University
8. University of Missouri
9. University of Oklahoma
10. Elon University
