Published by The Chronicle of Higher Education
What’s New
U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Colleges” lists for 2024 are out today. Although the publisher often makes tweaks to its ranking formula from year to year, the company’s leaders are calling this year’s revisions “the most significant methodological change in the rankings’ history.”
The vast majority of national colleges appeared to participate in this year’s undergraduate rankings by turning in U.S. News’ extensive data survey. U.S. News marked about 90 percent of institutions in its “National Universities” and “National Liberal Arts Colleges” lists as data submitters. That’s a much higher participation rate than for the magazine’s most recent law-school rankings, which many deans boycotted. Almost a third of law schools didn’t respond to that survey.
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The Backdrop
After law- and medical-school deans protested the rankings last fall and winter, rankings watchers have wondered if colleges would follow suit by ending cooperation with the undergraduate-programs lists. After all, the criticisms lobbed against the professional programs’ formulas often applied to the college rankingstoo: that they reward wealth and prestige, not benefits to society; that they incentivize the wrong investments.
But the rebellion seems to have died with the undergraduate lists. Yale University, which led the law-school insurrection, appears to have submitted data for the “Best Colleges” lists this year. Nonsubmitters tended to be institutions with low rankings who may have found that the benefits of cooperating aren’t worth the many hours it takes to fill out U.S. News’ data survey, or simply didn’t have the resources to do so.
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In a recent survey by Art & Science Group, a higher-ed consultancy, a nationally representative sample of high-school seniors reported on which rankings, if any, they used to help them decide where to go to college. Forty-two percent of the survey-takers said they didn’t consider any at all. Among the 58 percent who did consider them, U.S. News was the most popular ranker, with 22 percent of seniors saying they looked at the publisher’s lists. But U.S. News’ market share seems to have fallen in recent years. In a similar poll in 2016, Art & Science Group found 27 percent of seniors said they looked at U.S. News.
Compared with their counterparts in a pre-social-media and -smartphone era, prospective students today can easily get information about colleges from many more sources, including posts by current students, said Nanci Tessier, a principal at Art & Science Group. Prospective students can also search the internet and compare several publishers’ rankings, as they reported doing to The Chronicle this past spring.