Why some top schools are opting out of U.S. News’ college rankings list

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• John Yang:

  For decades, U.S. News and World Report has been ranking colleges and universities. And for decades, colleges and universities have been complaining about the guide's outsized influence and the criteria it uses.

  This week, Columbia University said it would no longer provide information for the rankings, the highest profile dropout from the undergraduate ratings. This follows a parade of prestigious law schools and medical schools that said they'd no longer participate in the graduate school rankings.

  Francie Diep is a senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering money in higher education. Francie, when Columbia announced the step they were taking, they said they had concerns about how the rankings distill a university's profile into a composite of data categories. Numbers alone could never convey the broader experience of undergraduate life at Columbia.

  Is that sort of the nub of the gist of their arguments against the rankings?

• Francie Diep, The Chronicle Of Higher Education:

  Yeah, I'd say so. That's a big deal for both Columbia and other colleges that have complained about the rankings. I would say another big thing for colleges is they feel that the rankings create sort of perverse incentives.

  So, for example, the law schools you mentioned, they dropped out. A number of them decided not to cooperate with U.S. News, and one of their complaints was that the rankings formula depends a lot on the employment rates of graduates, which you can totally understand why you would want that in your rankings. You go to law school and you hope that you're employed afterward.

  But some of the law schools that left U.S. News complained that fellowships did not count as employment. And they were saying, like, a lot of these fellowships funded by the schools themselves prepared students to go into public interest law.

  And so you can see how not counting fellowships as employment then might encourage law schools to offer fewer of these fellowships, maybe encourage students not to go to public interest law so much anyway. So that's another big problem for colleges, is the kinds of incentives that the formula can create.

• John Yang:

  And how does the US. News respond to those criticisms of those complaints?

• Francie Diep:

  Yeah, they've always said that they provide important data to students, that they are a source of independent third party ranking or an evaluation of colleges, that they don't encourage students to use the ranking number only, that it's supposed to be one of a lot of things that you look at as a student. And they've also said they will continue ranking those colleges that have supposedly dropped out. Like they can still create a ranking even without the colleges cooperating.

• John Yang:

  Columbia, of course, is the highest profile school, and I remember of the Ivy League to drop out of these rankings. Do you think we're going to see a parade like we did with the law schools and medical schools?

• Francie Diep:

  Yeah, you know, it's really hard to know. As a reporter, I haven't heard of anything. But that said, if any schools are planning to do this, they'd probably keep it pretty tight lipped. That said, the data survey that colleges turn into U.S. News that's due in like weeks. So, if colleges do have plans to boycott, we'll see that news come out pretty soon.

• John Yang:

  And I know you talked to high school students and high school guidance counselors to get a sense of how influential this guide is. These rankings are. What did they tell you?

• Francie Diep:

  The one thing you want you worry about is that some prospective student is going to look only at the ranking and not think about other factors that might be important to them, including, like, price of the college that might be important to them or certain programs.

  Anyway. When I talk to students, at least, you know, they all seem pretty savvy. They understood that rankings had flaws. They understood that they weren't supposed to look at only that. One kind of interesting thing I found was that the students that tended to rely the most on the rankings were actually sort of students who were ambitious. They could get into several good schools, but they didn't have a lot of — they weren't using their school counselors or the parents very much for guidance. They're kind of going at it on their own. Maybe their parents hadn't gone to college in the U.S. or hadn't gone to college at all, and so they're trying to figure things out on their own.

  You can totally see why something like a ranking would be really appealing to a student like that.

  Going into this story, I kind of expected that it might be sort of private school students, private prep school students might be sort of especially concerned with prestige. But in fact, what I found was that those students go to schools where they have really savvy school counselors.

  I've been trying to tell them for years, you know, you got to think about fit. You have to think about more than just the ranking. It's really the students with less guidance who, in my reporting at least, seem to rely more on the rankings.

• John Yang:

  How did U.S. News and World Report sort of a general interest magazine, which also rates, I believe, cars, diets, and nursing homes. How did it become so influential in higher education?

• Francie Diep:

  Yeah, you now, that is a great question. They started ranking colleges pretty early, so you know, they were one of the first. I don't think they were the absolute the first, but they have been doing it since the late 80s came out with this Best Colleges list. So, you know, I think being one of the first probably helped them with their influence a lot.

  Another thing is that at the time that the rankings came out, you know, it was a time when more young Americans were going to college than ever. Over the past few decades, the number of young Americans going to higher ed had, like, tripled. So you're having a lot of students who like the students that I talked to, maybe the first and their families to go to college and are just looking for a way to evaluate and decide where to go. And this product really filled that need.

  And so it's influence has only grown till today, although perhaps it's waning now that there's been sort of more of a public boycott.

• John Yang:

  Francie Diep at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thank you very much.

• Francie Diep:

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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