Rankings No More
Earlier this month, Colorado College announced that it was withdrawing from the U.S. News & World Report college and university rankings.
For decades, the U.S. News rankings played an extremely influential role in undergraduate admissions, even though it has been proven to be incorrect and misleading time after time. Last year, a number of top-tier law schools and medical programs pulled out from the popular list, but undergraduate programs have been very hesitant to follow suit, concerned of losing first-year applicants. In fact, the last time an established college program withdrew from the U.S. News rankings was Reed College in 1995. (The long PR battle between U.S. News and Reed College has been quite a fascinating story.)
The president of the college, L. Song Richardson, who was one of the final candidates mentioned to be appointed by President Joe Biden as Supreme Court Justice last year, firmly announced the decision via an alumni email. To be clear, Colorado College has always been a trailblazing institution – it was the first undergraduate program to implement the Block Plan (an extremely beneficial structure for neurodiverse learners) over four decades ago, and has been a vocal proponent of institutional antiracism commitment. Under Richardson’s leadership, Colorado College is now challenging other undergraduate programs to join the movement.
It often amazes me how, even in the year 2023, so many parents (and even consultants) blindly rely on the rankings. If I had a dollar for every client who wanted to have their student apply to the “top X schools in the U.S. News ranking,” I probably could have paid the website enough money to bump my own alma mater up the list a few spots. This problem is much, much worse overseas, where reliable information is too scarce to overcome international FOMO.
The process of researching programs and putting together a so-called ‘school list’ is an extremely important step in college admissions. It’s almost laughable to assume that colleges and universities — institutes that are SUPPOSED TO BE the living embodiment of diversity — could be lined up in a single ranking system. Yet, so many parents all over the world can’t help but count on the annual ranking, just because they see the so-called ‘prestigious’ schools more or less at the top.
The U.S. News ranking is indeed based on some meaningful data, such as reported test score ranges and number of applicants. But, the data are submitted directly by the very schools that are being ranked. The ranking is also based on some wildly irrelevant factors, like how much the school ‘donates’ to the list.
In a nutshell, deciding which schools to apply to based on the U.S. News ranking is as ridiculous as deciding which companies to invest your entire life’s savings into based on some marketing magazine’s annual article on “the best companies to work for.”
It’s about time gullible parents stop falling for the same, 40-year long marketing scheme.
Contact us at hello@lettucestudy.com for more information.
Written by Angelo (CEO of Lettuce Learn)
