Exclusive: What Those Volatile College Rankings Really Mean

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Poll: A First Pass

Before we start, here’s a poll.

I’ll ask you the same question again at the end of this post to see if you’ve changed your mind!

Introduction

The latest shakeup of U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) rankings has sent colleges, students, and parents into a tizzy. Elite institutions such as the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, Vanderbilt University, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), and NYU have seen dramatic drops in rankings. At the same time, many public universities have enjoyed unprecedented ranking boosts. UC Berkeley and UCLA, for example, are, for the first time, comfortably positioned in the Top 20 at number 15. Moreover, the University of Texas at San Antonio skyrocketed by 92 spots, now ranking 280.

As you can see in our exclusive USNWR historic rankings (1983-2024) line graph, these drastic changes are anomalous. Consider the interactive line graph below for a sample of the ranking trajectories of various elite universities.

Changes in Ranking Methodology

How did this happen? USNWR changed its ranking methodology. The ranking formula now emphasizes social mobility and outcomes. As a result, it added considerations such as “first-generation graduation rates, first-generation graduation rate performance, and proportion of college graduates earning more than a high school graduate.”

USNWR also expanded its definition of “social mobility” in the National University rankings to encompass first-generation and Pell-recipient graduation rates. Furthermore, the periodical removed five factors that significantly impacted college rankings: class size, faculty with terminal degrees, alumni donations, high school class standing, and the proportion of graduates who borrow federal loans.

How do Rankings Affect Students?

Disgruntled Students at NYU and Vanderbilt

The short-term implications are clear. A sizable population of NYU’s student body is considering transferring out. This is unsurprising. 55% of NYU students believe rankings to be important, and 51% of parents echo this sentiment.

Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Provost C. Cybele Raver criticized the rankings, writing to Vanderbilt students, alumni, and faculty members that the university is “stronger than at any time in its history.”

Diermeier and Raver also emphasized that the ranking drop was “entirely due to changes in U.S. News’s methodology,” adding that “U.S News’s change in methodology has led to dramatic movement in the rankings overall, disadvantaging many private research universities while privileging large public institutions.”

Amid students upset about the ranking drop, the university’s move faces another type of criticism. Student Olivia Chung, for instance, described the letter as damage control that reveals Vanderbilt’s elitist attitude. As a Vanderbilt alum myself, I feel ambivalent about the backlash. I agree with the detractors of the USNWR rankings. But we can’t deny that those numbers greatly influence the employment prospects of some students and alumni.

Graduate School and Employment Prospects

First, it is essential to think about claims made by critics of the USNWR rankings. Even huge differences in ranks are sometimes meaningless, and minor differences may belie stark academic contrasts. Does Tulane’s drop from 44 to 73 reflect a 29-rank difference in academic quality in a year? Are philosophy majors from the University of Pittsburgh (ranked 67) undeniably less competent than philosophy students at Rice (ranked 17)? I don’t know. But I know that Tulane graduates’ employment and graduate school prospects seem very respectable, as you can see here. And U Pitt’s philosophy program, at least at the graduate level, is among the best in the world, according to academic philosophers.

Graduate Programs: A Shocker at Ohio State

Speaking of academic philosophy, my experience in the field on both undergraduate and graduate levels is telling. My alma mater, Vanderbilt, has consistently been ranked in the Top 20 for two decades. However, its philosophy program is not renowned in analytic philosophy circles. When I enrolled in the doctoral program in philosophy at Ohio State (ranked 43), initially confident of my philosophical depth as a summa cum laude graduate from a more prestigious-sounding school, I got what I can only describe as a year of being intellectually kicked in the ass (and the teeth, the brain, and everywhere else).

A possible reason for this is that Vanderbilt isn’t a logic-heavy, analytic philosophy school. While many Vanderbilt professors and graduate students studied continental philosophy figures like Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Hegel, and Heidegger, I preferred analytic philosophers like Russell, Searle, and Grice, content that relatively few philosophy professors at Vanderbilt specialized in.

Moreover, Vanderbilt’s most difficult philosophical logic class stopped at intermediate, quantificational logic. Ohio State, on the other hand, taught advanced modal logic and meta-logic to graduate students and advanced undergrads. Sure, all the Ohio State undergrads taking that course pretty much failed. But still, the educational opportunities they received in philosophy far exceeded what I ever had as an undergrad at Vanderbilt.

Employment Prospects: My Degree is Still Useful After a Decade

Now that I have talked about how U.S. News Rankings can be meaningless, let’s think about how they are nevertheless powerful.

The Superficial Reason

The easiest job you can get as a graduate from a top-ranking university is what I am doing: test prep and college application guidance. There will never be a shortage of ambitious students who aspire to gain admission to elite universities. Your track record depends on whether they trust your ability to guide them through the application process. This means they care about not only which schools accepted your students but which schools accepted you. That might sound superficial, but it’s a sad fact we must swallow in this economy.

This focus on school rankings doesn’t stop at test prep and college application guidance jobs. A degree from a prestigious university is essential to work at specific companies such as Goldman Sachs, which has a mind-bogglingly low acceptance rate of 0.3%. Here are the stats to back up that claim:

Prevalence of select American university alumni at Goldman Sachs

Rank	University	Factor
1	Princeton University	2.130
2	Cornell University	1.650
3	Yale University	1.640
4	Columbia University	1.440
5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	1.330
6	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	1.260
7	University of Chicago	1.120
8	Harvard University	0.990
9	University of Pennsylvania	0.990
10	Stanford University	0.960
11	New York University (NYU)	0.790
12	University of Virginia	0.700
13	University of California, Berkeley (UCB)	0.620
14	Northwestern University	0.490
15	Johns Hopkins University	0.330
16	University of Michigan-Ann Arbor	0.280
17	University of North Carolina	0.270

A possible reason for this bias favoring prestigious universities at Goldman Sachs is that alumni connections play a decisive role in whether such highly selective companies hire a job candidate. Another possible (and better) reason is that higher-ranking institutions are predictive of more capable graduates. While this is not always the case, the reasoning is plausible. Let me explain.

The Better Reasons

Top-ranking universities are not mere status symbols. Elite colleges accept many students who have attained not only perfect or near-perfect scores on standardized tests like the SAT. They also attract many students who have achieved 4s and 5s on a multitude of AP tests. Applicants who excelled at around a dozen AP tests and extracurricular activities at a professional level are par for the course. This means that graduates of top-tier universities were likely competing against highly capable individuals whose talents are matched by an intense work ethic and remarkable leadership abilities. This, by itself, speaks volumes for elite university alumni’s presumed employability.

Furthermore, top-ranking universities often have many academic strengths across a wide variety of disciplines. These schools also tend towards low faculty-to-student ratios (e.g., 6:1 for Yale), giving students access to superstars in their fields. This not only equates to a more personalized and higher quality educational experience but also letters of recommendation written by otherwise inaccessible professors, which help with applying to graduate school and securing high-income employment.

How do Rankings Affect Universities?

Decreased Alumni Donations

High levels of alumni donation may indicate high levels of satisfaction with one’s alma mater. So, it is plausible that, since universities with lower ranks will have lower prestige, resulting in fewer employment opportunities, satisfaction with these schools will also decrease, leading to reduced alumni giving.

Whether or not that will be the case remains to be seen. But there is more reason to believe that alumni donations will fall. First, I speculate that alumni who want to bolster their schools’ rankings will no longer do so through donations, which are no longer a factor in USNWR’s ranking methodology. Second, universities are unlikely to solicit alumni donations as fervently as they used to. This, too, is speculative. But it does seem to make some sense since universities must use their limited resources wisely, and spending more on things that do not improve rankings is bad for business.

And in case you’re wondering, universities do run much like businesses. This is why there are student-led movements for fossil fuel divestment and why Harvard has a 53.2-billion-dollar endowment, which makes it richer than companies like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and Intel. In fact, Yale has yet to divest its endowment from weapons manufacturers!

Fewer Qualified Applicants

We can also expect plummeting private university rankings to reduce the number of qualified applicants at the affected schools. It’s common knowledge that the perceived prestige of a university is inextricably linked to its ranking. Justified or not, this number-driven cachet greatly influences where students choose to apply. According to one study, this is especially true if the university makes the Top 25, at which point they enjoy a substantially larger applicant pool. (This applies in my case as a transfer student. Compelled to apply to as many “good” schools as possible after an unexpected breakup and having limited information about different universities, I resorted to applying to as many top-ranking schools as possible.)

Higher Acceptance Rates and a Vicious Cycle

Larger applicant pools, in turn, bring down the acceptance rates of universities and drive their ranks up, leading to a virtuous cycle. The reverse, then, is true for smaller applicant pools.

Suppose significantly fewer students apply to a university because of its lower ranking. In that case, that university can take one of two actions: It can accept proportionately more students to ensure that it collects enough money from tuition. However, doing so increases its acceptance rate and risks a further drop in the rankings. Or it can accept fewer students to keep its acceptance rate low. Yet, this might equate to making less money, leading to limited resources and thus worse ranks as well. This, then, leads to a vicious cycle.

“Gaming” the Rankings

No discussion on the effect of rankings on colleges is complete without mentioning Northeastern University, one of the few schools that admit to “gaming” the rankings. In the 1990s, Northeastern’s president Richard Freeland recognized the positive impact of high ranks on increased visibility and prestige, qualified applicants, alumni donations, and revenue potential. By hiring professionals to reverse-engineer the rankings and crack the USNWR ranking formula, Freeland boosted Northeastern’s ranking by 42 spots to number 120 in eight years. This meteoric rise continued well into the 2010s–the university went from number 96 in 2009 to 42 in 2015, skyrocketing by 54 spots in six years.

Some examples of how such dramatic rises can happen are Northeastern’s meticulous cost-benefit analyses on ranking factors such as acceptance rates and graduation and retention rates. In 2003, Northeastern joined the Common Application, making it easier for students to apply and increasing the applicant pool, thereby lowering acceptance rates. This increased the school’s rank by seven spots in a year. Furthermore, Freeland read studies that showed that students who lived on campus were more likely to stay enrolled (an influential factor in USNWR rankings), so he oversaw the one-billion-dollar construction of dormitories to boost the number of on-campus students, further enhancing the school’s ranking and revenue.

Conclusion

So, are rankings meaningless? Perhaps. Do they matter? For certain career types, you bet! Armed with a deeper understanding of what USNWR rankings entail while deciding which university to attend, you should make sure not to conflate the ranking’s supposed meaninglessness with its undeniable power to influence employability and graduate school prospects.

However, if you don’t attend a super-duper university, don’t despair! As I mentioned, most employers care much more about your capabilities, work experience, and work ethic than the prestige of your alma mater.

If you have any questions or comments on university rankings, test prep, or college applications, why not leave a comment below or contact us? For deeper, expert insights into the complexities of higher education or to supercharge your academic career, book a session with Milestone College Consulting’s founder, Raymond, or let him edit your papers. We promise not to bite!

The Poll Again

Lastly, here’s the poll from the beginning again to see if you’ve changed your mind. Please don’t mess up the results by voting if you haven’t read this blog post!