The majority of students agreed that rankings don’t matter all that much to them.

To gauge their personal attitudes about the rankings, we read respondents a series of statements, including the extent to which they agreed or disagreed that the rankings mattered a great deal to them, that rankings were only of interest to students overly concerned about prestige and status, among others.

Only 10 percent of the respondents strongly agreed that rankings are very important in trying to sort out the differences between colleges. Sixteen percent strongly agreed and ten percent strongly disagreed that rankings were very important to their parents. Likewise, respondents were equally divided as to whether the rankings only matter to students interested in prestige and status.