U.S. News college rankings rankle critics

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 15, 1997 by Jeff Garigliano

Every year come fall, high-school seniors and their parents across the country start the long, typically frustrating process of college applications. And every year for the past decade, U.S. News & World Report has tapped into this market with its annual ratings issue, America's Best Colleges.

Lately, though, the guide has come under fire from a group of college students who say U. S. News World Report's ratings are methodologically flawed and distracting to campus administrators. The Forget U.S. News Coalition (FUNC), founded last October, comprises a group of students at universities across the country who argue that ranking something as complex and variable as a college education with a single number is an oversimplification. FUNC claims that the process makes college administrations focus on numerical rankings rather than on educating students.

U.S. News is not the only title putting out SIPs aimed at college applicants. Newsweek publishes an annual SIP, How to Get into College, in conjunction with Kaplan, the college-prep company. Time and The Princeton Review Team up for The Best College for You. And Money puts out an annual in the fall about the best buys in higher education.

But U.S. News has been the sole focus of FUNC's protest, primarily because of the title's established franchise in college guides and because of its overall ranking system. The other guides rate schools according to specific categories. In the U. S. News formula, schools are also rated in categories, but those numbers are then weighted and combined into one final rank. The school with the highest rank is touted that year as the "best" university. (Last year it was Yale, followed by Princeton and Harvard.)

FUNC isn't calling for U. S. News to stop putting out the issue, but merely to abandon the overall ratings. "Publishing the information is of vital importance in terms of making sure that freshmen can make intelligent decisions about the schools they want to attend," says Terry Lumish, a senior at Carnegie Mellon who serves on FUNC's coordinating committee. "It's just a question of how they [ U.S. News] do it." The FUNC proposal is to rank schools by category only and let readers choose for themselves which school is best.

Looking for reconciliation, the editors of U.S. News met with members of FUNC in December to hear each other out. The meeting was described as amicable, but neither side expects much change.

"The final outcome is that they weren't really that interested in our proposal," says Nick Thompson, the founder of FUNC and vice president of the Associated Students of Stanford University. "They listened to our arguments and told us we could go." The next step, continues Thompson, is persuading colleges and universities to withhold data from the U.S. News survey. "The rankings have an insidious impact on schools and administrations."

Several schools have already passed resolutions condemning the ratings, including Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Michigan, MIT and Wesleyan. Other universities are considering similar measures. But getting schools to withhold data could be far more difficult. In 1996, only a few schools, including Reed College in Oregon and the University of Rhode Island, withheld their information--and they were ranked by U.S. News nonetheless. In the meantime, FUNC has been getting coverage in newspapers across the country, from The New York Times to The Washington Post to the San Francisco Chronicle.

U.S. News admits that the idea of ranking schools in a one-size-fits-all formula isn't perfect. "We have never encouraged anyone to use the rankings as the final factor in which school to attend," says Bruce Zanka, director of communications for U.S. News. "It should be just one tool. Is it ideal for everyone? Certainly not. But does it work for the vast majority of consumers? We certainly think so, and the consumers think so as well because they're buying it."

Like the other newsweeklies, U.S. News is heavily subscription-driven, but the college issue still gives it a big boost on the newsstand. The ratings issue nearly doubled the average single-copy sales for U.S. News in 1994 and 1995, according to ABC figures. (The average for the last half of 1995 was 53,000. The college ratings issue sold almost 89,000 copies.) The ratings are also published in an expanded SIP, for which sales figures are unavailable.

Zanka says U.S. News recently launched a Website and started selling a CD-ROM, both of which provide a more tailored list of best schools by allowing students to enter specific factors about themselves. "We're constrained in the magazine as to how we can put the information out," he says. "Interactivity allows you to do those kinds of things."

Mel Elfin, editor of the college issue, says he understands FUNC's concerns. "I don't think anybody likes to be ranked." he says. "But the fact that [colleges] are willing to talk to us is a good indication that they have some faith in the process."

The guide's editors meet once a year with a group of college admissions and financial aid directors. "We spend a day and a half going through our methodology, our questionnaire and the way we collect our data," Elfin explains. "Over the rest of the year, we have maybe a hundred administrators, deans and provosts come in here and talk about the state of higher education."