Each year, as college decision deadlines approach, new rankings are released in large numbers on numerous websites.
How can you know which ones to trust and which ones to ignore?
We’ve compiled a description of a few of the most prominent sites to help you decide which is best.
Prominent US College Ranking Sites
U.S. News & World Report
Arguably the most used and popular ranking site on the internet, U.S. News & World Report has been ranking colleges since 1983.
They rank by four major categories: National Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges, and also have some smaller rankings based on popular majors.
The website’s ranking system is based on multiple factors that they list. They break their methodology down into a series of information, each given different amounts of weight.
The categories with the highest percentages are “Outcomes,” which describes graduation and retention rates, social mobility, and graduation rate performance; “Faculty Resources,” which is based on class sizes, student-faculty ratio, and faculty education; and “Expert Opinion,” a slightly more mysterious and questionable category that takes into account the opinions of presidents, provosts, and admissions deans.
As one of the three primary publishers of the Common Data Set, U.S. News & World Report has direct access to extensive information about each college. However, due to the popularity and influence of their lists, colleges have been shown to misrepresent numbers to increase their rankings.
While U.S. News & World Report is a valuable and respected tool for giving students general information about colleges, there are many reasons to be hesitant before applying to colleges based on their list.
Forbes
A more recent addition to the college rankings business, Forbes releases a yearly list of the top 650 undergraduate institutions based on a “consumer-centric approach,” according to Caroline Howard, Director of Editorial Operations, Forbes.
Just as Howard said, the methodology for their ranking skews heavily towards the students themselves, heavily weighting factors such as alumni salary, student debt, and the student experience.
These measurements may not capture a complete picture as specific programs, such as finance or economics may lead to higher-paying jobs, while a top art program may not achieve the same monetary success.
Additionally, allowing student debt to account for 20% of a school’s ranking heavily favors institutions that attract a wealthier student body rather than just those that give out financial aid.
A key difference in Forbes’s list compared to many others is that they have chosen to omit an institution’s acceptance rate, endowment, and freshmen SAT/ACT scores, all numbers that Forbes believes “say far more about a school’s ‘prestige’ than its actual effectiveness.”
Furthermore, Forbes considers a school’s score from previous years in addition to their current score, preventing the common variability that may occur in other lists due to methodology changes and not the colleges themselves.
Niche
Another especially popular site for college rankings is Niche, which posts dozens of lists from Best Colleges to Hardest to Get in.
Their filter options are quite extensive, allowing students to search by “area of study,” type of student (HBCU, All-Women, All-Men), testing scores, and more, providing students with a tool to become familiar with colleges that may fit into their desires.
Niche’s biggest advantage over other ranking sites is its enormous number of reviews from college students themselves.
The site has over 180,000 college reviews from real students and heavily incorporates them into its rankings. However, it may be just as, if not more, helpful to read the reviews on colleges you’re interested in yourself.
It’s often possible for rankings to become skewed as students will rate their own institution more highly than others out of either rivalry or simply not enough exposure to other schools.
Reading the reviews that inform these rankings directly will allow you to decide for yourself whether or not a student is being biased or sincere.
Thankfully, while scrolling through Niche’s seemingly endless categories for lists, at the top of each page, they include a link to their methodology for that specific list, so you always know what is being accounted for in the rankings you’re looking at.
Princeton Review
In addition to its test prep services, the Princeton Review also has its own college rankings list; however, it is much different from other websites.
Princeton Review has determined the best 385 colleges but does not rank them in a traditional sense; instead, it simply lists them in alphabetical order.
They give for their lack of number rankings because “all 385 schools in the book are academically outstanding,” and that is true to an extent.
But, it also seems as though this strategy is done to promote sales of their book version of this list, which features the top 20 schools out of those 385 in 68 different categories.
In addition, they could try to entice you into purchasing their book by giving a sneak peek of the schools that will be listed, but nothing beyond that.
Washington Monthly
Washington Monthly chooses to review only four-year liberal arts colleges that exclusively offer bachelor’s degrees.
It ranks schools based on “their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: social mobility, research, and promoting public service.” In addition, it openly says its ranking system was created because it felt the U.S. News & World Report rankings could be skewed.
A review of its methodology shows that all three categories it focuses on are weighted equally. In addition, they chose several types of schools, such as those with less than 100 students and military universities.
Do College Rankings Really Matter?
One of the major problems with college ranking lists as a whole is that they promote a single-minded thought process in which each school is inferior or superior to another purely based on the number next to its name.
In reality, each school has certain factors that make it a better option than others for specific students. It is up to the student to do their own research and find out more about the schools they’re interested in.
No one school is the best academically in every category and every major.
And it is highly unlikely that one school will check all the boxes for every student.
Rankings should serve as a baseline for subsequent research conducted by the students.
College rankings can serve as a launching point towards finding the school that is right for you, but that decision should come after investigating many vital details: talking with current students, taking an in-person or virtual tour, and much more.
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