U.S. colleges and universities are governed by many traditions – including the annual U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, which list schools based on a variety of factors, like graduation rates and reputation.
This year’s rankings hit the streets on Sept. 22, 2026. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology topped the list of national universities, and Williams College ranked first among the list of national liberal arts colleges.
Princeton University, meanwhile, slipped out of the top spot among research universities after holding that first position for 15 years. And Amherst College, where I teach political science and law, seems stuck in second place behind archrival Williams – a position it has occupied for more than a decade.
Some people think that the rankings are skewed, rewarding prominent colleges and universities for little more than their wealth. However, for less prestigious and less wealthy schools, the rankings can be consequential, giving them visibility they might not otherwise have.
As higher education economists James Monks and Ronald G. Ehrenberg have noted, a low ranking can lead a school to “accept a greater percentage of its applicants.” It can also mean that “a smaller percentage of its admitted applicants matriculate, and the resulting entering class is of lower quality, as measured by its average SAT scores.”
As someone who follows and writes about developments in higher education, I think the picture of college rating systems’ impact is not all gloom and doom, not to be treated as if they were solely to blame when colleges pay undue attention to things that affect their rank rather than the quality of the education they offer.
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A history of college rankings
As early as 1911, Kendric Babcock, a former university president working for the U.S. Bureau of Education, issued a report that placed 344 universities and colleges into four tiers.
And in 1935, Edwin Embree, a former vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote an essay that appraised U.S. universities.
He put Harvard at the top of his list, followed by the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University.
Embree reported that a “storm” ensued, as complaints “and questions rained in from university presidents and professors all over the country. Even institutions which I had rated high protested that they should be higher, and universities omitted from the list wailed.”
The first U.S. News college rankings were released several decades later, in 1983.
That same year, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, an agency housed in the Department of Education, released a study that showed a rather bleak picture of higher education in the U.S.
The study emphasized that “young people were not learning enough to live, work, and compete in the new economy.” It also claimed that from top to bottom, the education system had given up on excellence.
That helps explain why the U.S. News rankings made such a big splash when they first came out. They provided a window into what was happening within colleges and universities that people otherwise would not have seen. They provided information that would help prospective students and also introduce some healthy competition into the world of higher education.
Unlike previous rankings in the early 1900s that were geared toward academic audiences, U.S. News’ list was intended for students to read and learn from.
Today there are many college rankings issued by different organizations, such as Forbes Magazine and Time.
But the U.S. News college rankings still tend to elicit the biggest headlines whenever they are released.
Everyone is a critic
U.S. News considers various factors when determining its rankings: graduation rates, first-year retention rates, peer assessment, financial resources, faculty salaries, faculty who are full time, student-faculty ratio and reputation among college presidents.
Its rankings have been criticized for various reasons – including the claim that these rankings equate academic quality with a school’s money.
Others have criticized the rankings because, as the philosopher William Casement observes that, “the most important element in the college experience is largely ignored: the learning process that occurs over four years” as well as “the maturation of critical-thinking skills.”
I believe there is some truth to those criticisms. College rankings have surely led schools to think too much about the optics of their ranking.
And some schools, including Columbia University, Reed College and Sarah Lawrence College, have stopped giving some data that U.S. News needs, or to answer its questions about the reputation of their peers.
But U.S. News can still draw from publicly available university data to complete their rankings.
In 2022, Yale Law School also announced that it would no longer participate in the U.S. News ranking of law schools, arguing that the rankings’ metrics could dissuade law schools from supporting public-interest careers by rewarding them for things like how much students made after they graduated.
How rankings help higher education
At the end of the day, I and others scholars think that these rankings are helpful in some way.
The U.S. News rankings function like the annual audits done in businesses and also provide a form of much-needed public recognition for colleges and universities at a time when the public’s confidence in higher education is at an all-time low.
While the rankings can’t capture everything, like different students’ learning process and day-to-day experiences, they provide some comparability across institutions.
U.S. News has also responded by its critics by focusing more on quantitative measures that allow clear institutional comparisons, such as first-year retention rates, graduation rates and student-faculty ratios.
The bottom line
Like it or not, the U.S. News rankings tend to hold a lot of weight for people, especially college applicants and their families. As I have described above, in terms of its impact on higher education, the record of U.S. News Best Colleges list is mixed.
But, it and other college rankings offer enough value that, as Colin Diver, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former president of Reed College, writes, the rankings have “withstood decades of withering criticism.”
In the end, they are one piece of a puzzle that U.S. News says helps “identify the institution that best aligns with a student’s academic interests, goals and preferences” and helps colleges know how well they are doing.
