College rankings are losing relevance due to policy changes under the second Trump administration, higher education insiders say.
Federal funding cuts have targeted gender identity programs, foreign enrollment pipelines, race-based programs and student aid for low-paying humanities degrees that the rankings traditionally have praised. This seismic shift has prompted universities to freeze hiring, lay off workers and gut liberal arts programs.
Experts interviewed by The Washington Times said that annual college rankings by outlets such as Washington Monthly, Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report have failed to keep up with the changes. The outlets published their latest ratings in August and September.
“President Trump didn’t singlehandedly reshape the higher education landscape, but he tapped into skepticism that was already bubbling,” said Jayson Weingarten, a former University of Pennsylvania admissions officer who works as a consultant at Ivy Coach, a college counseling firm. “That shift affects rankings profoundly and puts schools outside the top 100 at risk of faltering amid the cries of ‘it’s not worth it anymore.’”
“The issue is we mostly still don’t know how big an effect these changes are going to have,” said Dick Startz, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “That uncertainty makes the latest rankings problematic.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Education has prioritized funding for artificial intelligence and vocational training, signaling new avenues for assessing colleges’ merits.
Analysts say this shift has fueled students’ fears that most four-year degrees are obsolete in today’s job market. According to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, nearly a third of annual job openings through 2031 will require some sort of credentials but no baccalaureate degree.
“The Trump administration has spotlighted huge failures in higher education, such as taking on too much debt for too little education and future returns,” said Siri Terjesen, an economist and associate dean at public Florida Atlantic University.
According to admissions consultants, students are increasingly paying more attention to technological changes in the economy than to rankings that pricey universities use for marketing.
“What the Trump-era policy shift accelerated wasn’t the decline of rankings, but the collapse of naive trust in institutional branding,” said John Morganelli, an official at the private Ivy Tutors Network and former Cornell University admissions director. “When federal cuts reshape access, affordability, and outcomes reporting, families question the actual measurements of these rankings.”
Changing standards
College rankings have evolved several times over the past 40 years, setting the stage for the Trump administration’s focus on return on investment.
The trend of media outlets ranking universities annually began in 1983, when U.S. News and World Report published its first list of top campuses.
The U.S. News rankings have long targeted high-performing students from wealthy families by highlighting elite campuses that reject 99% of applicants. Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University were the top three schools in the latest rankings published last month, reflecting little change from past years.
“While their rankings may not paint a comprehensive picture of individual programs or majors, their aggregate data helps users benchmark colleges’ selectivity,” said Emerson Blais of Dewey Smart, an admissions consulting firm.
Other rankings aim to reach the 99% of students who do not attend top-rated U.S. News schools.
In 1992, Princeton Review published the first edition of “The Best 390 Colleges,” which ranks schools based on student and faculty survey responses.
The latest Princeton Review rankings released in August include elite universities such as Brown and Cornell among the most popular in the nation. They also feature an unranked list of “best value” regional colleges such as George Washington University and Virginia Tech.
In an emailed statement, the Princeton Review said its latest ratings do not reflect the Trump administration changes because they were based on surveys from the past three years.
However, the publication noted that 46% of 10,000 college applicants and parents responding to a survey this year cited “a potentially better job and income” as their top reason for pursuing higher education.
“With the increasingly high cost of college, naturally, people are concerned about the return on the investment,” the Princeton Review said.
More recent college rankings have de-emphasized institutional prestige and campus satisfaction, focusing instead on student outcomes.
In 2005, Washington Monthly began ranking colleges based on four criteria: access, affordability, outcomes, and service.
Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris said his “populist rankings” have gained favor among working-class conservatives and liberals alike. For example, former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon interviewed him for an episode of his “War Room” podcast in August.
“We’re looking for colleges that provide a reasonably priced tuition, don’t load students down with debt, lead to jobs with good earnings and encourage and teach them to be good citizens,” said Mr. Glastris, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.
The top four schools in the latest Washington Monthly rankings in August are not nationally famous: Berea College in Kentucky, Cal State Fresno, Cal State Northridge and Cal State Los Angeles. However, they regularly match working-class students with hands-on internships and careers.
The rankings have taken greater account of post-graduation outcomes over the past decade, moving beyond graduation rates as a metric of success.
In 2015, the Obama Education Department started reporting the educational debt and earnings of alumni at each school. The federal agency continues to publish a College Scorecard with this information online.
Mike Itzkowitz, a former Education Department official who created the scorecard, said students must look beyond rankings to decide if a college is worth their investment.
“Rather than rankings, it’s critical to consider the out-of-pocket costs to get a degree along with the historical earnings potential of previous students,” Mr. Itzkowitz, president of The HEA Group, said in an email.
Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, said the Trump administration’s changes are moving too fast for traditional rankings to track them.
“The challenge is we have hundreds of struggling colleges, and it’s hard to predict which ones will close,” said Mr. Kelchen, who has calculated the annual rankings for Washington Monthly since 2012. “We can only provide information on colleges that have done a pretty good job recently.”
The Huron Consulting Group, a higher education strategy firm, estimates that as many as 370 private nonprofit colleges will shutter or merge in the next decade, reflecting declining U.S. birth rates. There are roughly 1,700 such campuses nationwide.
Huron’s projection is more than three times the 114 private nonprofit two- and four-year colleges that the National Center for Education Statistics reported had closed in the 10 years leading into fall 2020.
Many experts say the Trump administration will likely add to those closures, making it harder for rankings to endorse struggling colleges that rely on them for positive buzz.
“The Trump administration has exposed just how shallow and outdated many of the ranking systems are, and in doing so, it has accelerated the ‘rightsizing’ of higher education,” said Kate Bierly, higher education analyst at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Some academics say the rankings convey little information about real-time trends because the media outlets that publish them routinely manipulate their calculations for marketing reasons.
“They are mostly a measure of prestige, not quality,” said Timothy Cain, a University of Georgia higher education professor.
Institutional drift
While many universities tout their performance in annual rankings, others have shunned them as irrelevant to their success in the Trump era.
“The State University System of Florida has proven once again why we remain the #1 public university system in the nation,” Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said in a Sept. 23 statement, referring to seven of his 12 campuses making it into U.S. News and World Report’s top 100 colleges.
Nora Demleitner, the immediate past president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, said only college administrators still pay close attention to rankings.
“There is at least one study indicating that applicants and their parents first pick a school and then consult rankings, not the other way round,” Ms. Demleitner said in an email.
Grand Canyon University, a private Christian institution whose enrollment has boomed in recent years, doesn’t participate in the U.S. News rating system. The Phoenix, Arizona campus graduated a record–high 31,104 students this past spring.
“We are much more interested in how employers view us than we are with these rankings,” Brian Mueller, Grand Canyon’s president, said in an email.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.