Battered by funding cuts, bombarded by the White House and braced for demographic changes set to send enrollment into a nosedive, America’s colleges and universities have spent this year in flux.
But one of higher education’s rituals resurfaced again on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published the college rankings that many administrators obsessively track and routinely malign.
And, at least in the judgment of U.S. News, all of the headline-making upheaval has so far led to … well, a lot of stability.
Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University retained the top three spots in the publisher’s rankings of national universities. Stanford University kept its place at No. 4, though Yale University also joined it there. Williams College remained U.S. News’s pick for the best national liberal arts college, just as Spelman College was again the top-ranked historically Black institution.
In one notable change, the University of California, Berkeley, was deemed the country’s top public university. But it simply switched places with its counterpart in Los Angeles.
For those picking (or running) an American college, U.S. News is a pre-eminent purveyor of water-cooler talk, despite longstanding misgivings about whether trying to rate colleges is even a good idea.
U.S. News defends its rankings as essential services for consumers figuring out what is one of life’s big-ticket buys.
The publisher shut down its print newsmagazine in 2010, but it has said at least 100 million users a year visit its education website, despite decades of complaints about issues like data scandals and vacillating methodologies.
Rankings are not — and never have been — reflective of all that much more than a publisher’s algorithm. Many college administrators have begrudgingly accepted that Americans relish rankings, so many schools still provide data that supports the effort. They also often also pay for data and marketing licenses to tout their spots on the lists. Those sales can add up to millions of dollars in annual revenues for publishers like U.S. News.
And many administrators are thought to try to tie institutional priorities to possible rises and falls in the standings, sensitive to how changes might affect donations and applications.
While the top positions barely budged, this year carried a bit more mystery than usual since U.S. News said in May that Robert Morse, who worked on the first batch of rankings in 1983 and took over the program in 1989, was retiring.
U.S. News said it did not alter its formula for this year beyond what it described as “small adjustments” that it said were intended “to reflect evolving admissions considerations, cohort representation and student involvement.” A spokesperson said that the tumult the White House has unleashed throughout higher education was not a factor.
Only three national universities ranked in this year’s top 50 — the California Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Chicago — shifted at least five places. Northeastern climbed eight spots, to a five-way tie for No. 46.
Chicago and Caltech alternated ranks: Chicago moved to No. 6, while Caltech fell to No. 11. Caltech did not respond to a request for comment.
The relative stability made it highly improbable that U.S. News would set off a tempest like it did two years ago, when a drastic shift in methodology sent the rankings of some wealthy private universities tumbling.
U.S. News, of course, is not the only publisher of rankings, which are inherently arbitrary ventures shaped by the priorities and whims of the people who design the formulas.
Last month, for example, Washington Monthly ranked Berea College as the nation’s best college “for your tuition (and tax) dollars,” followed by the Fresno, Northridge and Los Angeles campuses of California State University. Princeton stood at No. 5, and Harvard was ranked 28th. (U.S. News, by comparison, had Berea in a tie with four others for No. 45 among liberal arts colleges.)
“These unsung colleges are, to be blunt, not the kind to which ambitious and well-off parents urge their children to apply,” Washington Monthly editors wrote. “But the colleges don’t care, and neither do we, because what makes them extraordinary is what they do for students from not-so-well-off households.”
There has been some polling in recent years suggesting that rankings’ power over prospective students and parents has been diminishing. Many administrators, though, assume the industry is sticking around for the foreseeable future.
Richard K. Lyons, an economist who became Berkeley’s chancellor last year, acknowledged his pride in the school’s longstanding stature and his sense that consumers benefited from information. But he nevertheless warned against putting too much emphasis on any one ranking since each has “its own idiosyncratic weighting system.” He also insisted he was “not managing Berkeley to the rankings.”
“For users, I’d say take weighted averages,” Dr. Lyons said. “But to presidents, you’ve got to stand on your values first.”