Deciding Where To Apply: College Rankings 101
By Spencer Pevsner & Valerie Erde
Before you decide how to apply to college, you need to decide where. With thousands of colleges and universities across the U.S. and overseas, building a college application list can be a daunting task.
There’s More Than One Way to Organize Rankings
Many parents have only heard of one set of rankings: U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges. While this is by far the best-known list, it is by no means the only set of rankings out there.
For the record, U.S. News and World Report rankings try to encompass a pretty complete picture of what a college or university’s quality is like overall. That means their rankings are based on a board set of criteria, including, but not limited to:
SAT/ACT scores of admitted students
Rankings Based on Return on Investment (ROI)
Georgetown University’s Centers on Education and the Workforce has put out its own rankings based on ROI – namely, how much money graduates make on average, both immediately after graduating as well as five, 10, 20, 30, and 40 years down the line. Their report, A First Try at ROI: Ranking 4,500 Colleges, finds that on average bachelor’s degrees from private colleges have a higher ROI than degrees from public colleges 40 years after enrollment. Community colleges and many certificate programs have the highest returns in the short term, though returns from bachelor’s degrees eventually overtake those of most two-year credentials.
Rankings Based on Institutional Financial Health
Forbes has graded and ranked hundreds of colleges based on their financial health. Criteria include endowment size, liquidity, tuition, expenses and more. Note that the list is not comprehensive, as it’s much harder to gauge the finances of public institutions whose funding can vary based on both economic and political changes.
How Colleges Game the Rankings System
College admissions professionals know that people look at rankings for guidance, so they have taken to “rankings management” — that is, artificially inflating certain factors that will move them up in the rankings. For instance, many colleges want to report a low acceptance rate so they can be ranked among the rarified “most selective” schools. Officials have said to themselves, “Hey, why don’t we advertise more to get more students to apply, and then maintain or lower the number of students we accept?”
Rankings Have Their Place, But Use Them Wisely
In short, rankings should never be the sole or even primary factor in deciding what schools to apply to — and you should take them with a huge grain of salt. Rankings are most useful in narrowing down the range of schools you’re considering, but at the end of the day, personal preferences about school size, region, majors, and educational philosophy are far more important. So consider college rankings as just one of many tools at your disposal — and a subjective one at that.
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Deciding Where To Apply: College Rankings 101
