Published by The New York Times
After months of tumult on American college campuses, relative stability in one realm returned on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published its oft-disparaged but nevertheless closely watched rankings.
Many top schools held the same, or similar, spots they had a year ago.
Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution, while the University of California, Los Angeles, fared best among public universities.
Few franchises in American higher education are as contentious as the U.S. News rankings. Over the decades, their publisher has faced trouble with manipulated data, complaints about murky methodologies, accusations of revenge and the foundational question of whether it is appropriate to rank colleges.
To U.S. News, which retired its print newsmagazine in 2010, the rankings are a bastion of its largely bygone influence. They are also a source of millions of dollars each year, as universities pay licensing fees to promote how they fared. U.S. News, which insists that its business relationships with schools do not affect rankings, contends that it is performing a public service by distilling a chaotic collegiate marketplace for weary consumers.
Indeed, to students and their parents, the rankings can be tools for narrowing college searches, and status symbols surrounding admissions to certain schools. To university leaders, the rankings are often publicly heralded but privately detested. To regulators, including Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona, the rankings are responsible for “an unhealthy obsession with selectivity” and the development of “the false altar of U.S. News and World Report.”
And to almost everyone outside U.S. News, they are opaque and, ultimately, almost uniformly misunderstood.
…
A pair of reports in recent weeks underscored how fraught the rankings remain and offered new fodder for the debate about whether universities should seek U.S. News’ favor.
Art & Science Group, a higher education consultancy, found that some 40 percent of students do not use rankings at all when they are picking colleges and that only 3 percent turn to them through the whole of their college searches.
Separately, Vanderbilt University was so thoroughly enraged by its five-spot dip in the U.S. News standings last year that the school commissioned a review of the methodologies of five rankings services. The resulting report argued that those rankings were rife with flaws, including faulty data and subjectivity.
Rankings publishers have routinely argued that their guides are essential but that they should not be the sole drivers of college searches.
U.S. News said it “strongly” advised visitors to its website to “consider the rankings alongside additional information from U.S. News and other sources and in light of personal interests and priorities when deciding where to apply to and attend college.”