Deciding Where To Apply:

College Rankings 101

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COLLEGE ESSAY
COLLEGE PLANNING
GUIDANCE
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.

Where do you even start?

Many students — and especially their parents! — focus on college rankings as the first step in
researching schools. But this isn't the only way to gather information, and it's certainly not the
best.

That's because no single number can summarize the relative worth of an institution as
complex as a university. It would be like — well, like trying to summarize the worth of a
student with just a single SAT or ACT score. You know that your test scores can't possibly
capture who you are as a person, so it stands to reason that rankings can't give the full picture
of a college, either.

So, let’s do a deep dive into college rankings: What are they good for, how can you use them,
and how much credence should you give them?
 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
• Graduation rates
• Faculty quality
• Financial resources
 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.
Still, ROI is a factor to consider if optimizing earning
potential and having the income to pay off student
loans after graduation is a major consideration for
your family.
 Rankings Based on Institutional Financial Health

Many institutions of higher

education were struggling
financially before the COVID-19
pandemic.
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.
 Rankings Based On A “Holistic” View

You may not be familiar with the

college search platform Niche, but
Niche rankings incorporate many
more factors (54) into its rankings
than U.S. News, Forbes, et. al. 
including survey responses from
students and alumni, data about
finances, diversity, whether the
school is a “party” school, and how
“nice” the campus is, among others. 
While this ranking system may
provide, perhaps, a more “holistic”
picture of an institution, the
downside is that the ranking will be
affected by a whole host of factors
that you may not care about at all.
 How to Use College Rankings the Right Way

With any of these rankings, there's one crucial thing to remember: Small
differences in ranking are meaningless, but differences of 20 or 50 steps can
indicate some valid distinctions. It's a waste of time to focus on the minute
differences between schools ranked 1, 2, and 3 — they're all excellent!
Instead, take a look at the differences between schools ranked 3, 22, 50, and
100.
You want to start by getting a feel for the range of schools it makes sense to apply to.
If you don’t have the “numbers” (GPA and test scores) to apply to an Ivy League or
other highly selective school, then don’t waste time looking at the tiny differences
among those in the top 10! Find your target range and go from there with your
research.
If you're not sure how competitive your personal "numbers" are, your school guidance
counselor can be a good guide for getting a sense of what range of schools to apply to.
They've worked through thousands of applications and know the lay of the admissions
landscape. Some guidance counselors can be quite conservative, though, and will
advise you not to try for more prestigious schools. If you want to put in the hard work
to reach for a better school, go for it! It’s okay to take some risks as long as you’ve got
a solid backup plan.
 Dig Deeper Into Institutional Culture

Even rankings that split universities and

colleges into separate lists might not go
far enough into the details you need to
make an informed decision. One problem
is a tendency toward apples-to-oranges
comparisons. For example, can you really
compare liberal arts schools with
conservatory programs to those that
don’t have them? Or compare the
iconoclastic "Great Books" academic
structure of St. John’s College to more
mainstream liberal arts schools? What
about the unique status of Cornell
University, which has features of both a
land-grant university and a private
college?
 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

The rankings companies are in some ways victims of their own success: Their
widespread popularity has, paradoxically, led to them becoming less useful over
the years.

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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