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How much weight should I put on

college rankings?

f I started out by telling you to ignore the rankings, you wouldn’t

I listen to me: the rankings are too intriguing and enticing not to at
least take a sneak peak. I know my families are looking at them,
so what I want to do is discuss the value of the rankings, the flaws of
the rankings, and the danger of the rankings. I want to encourage
responsible use of the rankings.
What would you think if you were a boy in high school and you
were dating a girl at your high school, and I came up to you and said,
"I have ranked all of the girls in our school from number 1 to number
1000 in our school and I just want to ask, why are you dating number
87 when number 16 on my rankings has a crush on you?" First of all,
you would look at me like I was insane, but here is what you would
144 171 ANSWERS TO THE MOST-ASKED COLLEGE ADMISSIONS QUESTIONS

probably be thinking: "How do you know what personality meshes

with my personality? How do you know whether the girls you ranked
ahead of my girlfriend have the same interests I have? How do you
know who I find to be physically attractive? "
I have so much respect for the approach that the Princeton Review
takes in their excellent book, The Best 382 Colleges. They do rank
colleges, and even that is not precise, but they refuse to do an aggregate
or cumulative ranking. They refuse to say, "school X is better than
school Y." Here is what they say instead: "The Princeton Review does
not rank the schools in the book overall, 1 to 382, hierarchically or in
a single list category. The Princeton Review reports the top 20 schools
(of the 382 in the book) for each of its 62 different ranking list
categories—but does not report ranks beyond the top 20 in any
category (i.e., schools ranked 21 to 382)" (The Best 382 Colleges, 2018
edition).
There are so many college rankings, and they are all over the place
when it comes to
where a college is
ranked. This is
because they all
have different
formulas. You will
often hear US
News rankings
quoted. They were
the first source to
really promote an
aggregate ranking.
They did this over
35 years ago, and
they were so popular that now their college rankings are what they are
primarily known for, and they have become a complete non-factor as
a news agency.
After years of railing against the USNWR rankings and how
biased and inaccurate they are, a slew of others have jumped into the
rankings game, coming up with their own formulas, often much better
 MARK STUCKER 145

than US News formula, but still inadequate to properly reflect your

values and what you want in a college experience.
Here are a baker’s dozen of the other rankings that have sprung
up in the few decades:

1. Washington Monthly
2. Forbes
3. Kiplinger
4. Niche
5. Princeton Review
6. Business Week
7. Newsweek
8. Times Higher Education World University Rankings
9. Center for World University Rankings
10. Parchment Student Choice College Rankings
11. Collegiate Choice
12. Money Magazine
13. College Factual Rankings

At first I was disheartened when all of these rankings started springing

up, because in my experience as a college coach, parents and students
put entirely too much weight on the rankings. But over time, I began
to like the spate of new rankings, because they enabled me to make a
point I have been making since the early 90’s when I worked in college
admissions: You have to use your own value system to come up with a
personal ranking that reflects what you value and in the right
apportionment that you value school characteristics.
Let’s look at a few examples of how this collection of rankings
undermines the perceived precision of accuracy that the public affords
them.

ℵ CUNY (College of New York) Baruch College is number

2 in the Money Magazine college rankings, but in
USNWR, they do not even make the national rankings
and only come in 20th in their region.
ℵ The Times Higher Education World University Rankings
has Dartmouth at 104, and but they are 11th in USNWR.
146 171 ANSWERS TO THE MOST-ASKED COLLEGE ADMISSIONS QUESTIONS

ℵ Wesleyan University is 374th in the Center for World

University Rankings, but 10th with Kiplinger.
ℵ Berea College is Number 1 with Washington Monthly,
but number 367 with Forbes.

The best article I have ever read on the college rankings was published
on August 9th, 2016 by Jeremy Ratcliff, and it is titled, "Deciphering
the Different College Rankings." I strongly encourage you to Google
this article. Ratcliff talks about how in high school, he was rankings-
obsessed but then he decided to do a study of the rankings. In this
article, he goes over the different formulas for a bunch of the rankings
and then he draws attention to their biases. For example, Ratcliff says
USNWR is biased against regional universities and up-and-coming
universities. I would also add that it is biased against public colleges; it
doesn’t do enough surveying of students about their experiences, and
it definitely doesn’t factor in the value of racial and socio-economic
diversity into its rankings. If you want to read the best article I have
ever read about the deleterious impact USNWR college rankings have
had on American higher education, I strongly encourage you to
Google the following article: “How U.S. News college rankings
promote economic inequality on campus,” September 10th, 2017, by
Benjamin Wermund of Politico.
The Washington Monthly rankings do a great job of looking at
whether a college improves society by educating the less fortunate, but
they do not even look at political diversity and cultural intolerance.
They rank Washington & Lee, where General Lee was serving as
President when he died and became the school's namesake, as the 7th
ranked school in the country. W & L has their strengths, but the
student body overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump, so for a lot of
the students I work with, when they go through the process of
assessing the political and cultural environment they want, there is no
way Washington and Lee is going to be the 7th ranked school based on
what they are looking for. According to collegedata.com, fewer than 1
in 40 W & L students are Black. That is not going to be enough racial
diversity for most of the students I work with, so the number 7 ranking
is irrelevant.
 MARK STUCKER 147

You'll also want to be wary of any rankings a school shares with

you on your campus visit. It isn't that they're lying, it's just that with
so many rankings available, it's easy for a school to find a set of
rankings that makes them look good. Colleges use these because it
comes across as objective and outside substantiation.

I know it may seem like I am anti-rankings, but I have a lot more

respect for rankings that are based on surveys and for rankings that are
in an individual category. For example, the USNWR has a pretty good
formula for ranking which colleges are the most selective, but where
they go off the tracks is by telling you college X is the best overall
college. Our brains like to put things in order, so these ordinal rankings
can be seductive. Have you ever noticed why the rankings change every
year? They need to sell magazines, so they keep changing their
formula, revealing just how imprecise the rankings are.
Princeton Review takes 62 different categories, and they survey
around 140,000 students, about 375 per campus, and they come up
with the top 20 list using scientific survey methods. I respect the
formula but it still has to be processed through your value system and
what you want. When they say, "the following top 20 schools have the
best campus food," I know it is based on a large enough sample size.
148 171 ANSWERS TO THE MOST-ASKED COLLEGE ADMISSIONS QUESTIONS

Ditto for their question about the top 20 colleges where professors get
high marks. But it isn’t perfect, because all you have to do is look back
the year before and you will see that by surveying different people you
get different results.
Let me share an example of how to combine responsible use of
the rankings with you customizing the rankings to reflect your values.
I think Bloomberg’s Business Week does as good a job as any
rankings at having a respectable formula. For their 2016 top
undergraduate business schools, they surveyed over 30,000 students
and 600 companies, and here is how they weight everything in their
formula:

• "Employer Survey (40 percent of total score): Feedback from

recruiters who hire recent business graduates on how well
schools prepared students for jobs at their companies.
• Student Survey (35 percent): Students' own ratings of the
campus, career services department, and faculty and
administrators.
• Starting Salary (15 percent): The base compensation of
students who had jobs lined up, adjusted for salary variation
across industries and regions.
• Internship (10 percent): The percentage of a school’s
graduates who had at least one internship at any time during
college."

While this is nice, what if a school is in the boonies and you would die
if you were not in the city? What if a school is in freezing cold weather
and you get depressed without your large dose of sunshine? What if
you value a racially and socio-economically diverse student body?
What if cost is a concern? None of those things are factored into
Bloomberg’s rankings. In chapter 16, I discuss the 32 factors that will
help you determine the right college for you.
Ratcliff's summary of his article was so on point; I agree with every
single word:
“I hope you can take one thing away from it: college rankings
should only be taken with a grain of salt. No college ranking can
accurately say where you will be the most successful, feel the most
 MARK STUCKER 149

comfortable, make your closest friends, or meet professors who will

impact your life the in ways you simply cannot predict as a high school
senior. College rankings are made by people who try to arbitrarily
weigh your college experience for you without knowing what you
value.”

Joy and I visited a college that

had twice been recognized by a
highly-respected publication as
the most beautiful college in the
country. The school was proud of
this, and the tour guide repeated
their ranking twice. Joy thought
that the campus was a complete
eyesore, and I tended to agree
with her. She still talks about how
ugly that place was! Be careful
how much stock you put into
college rankings, because
subjectivity always comes into
play in their creation.