US News & World Report College Rankings 2008: Why You Shouldn't Pay Attention to Them

US News claims that it ranks colleges in order to provide students and their families with an easier way to compare colleges before sending in applications. However, my problem with the rankings is the negative image of public schools that they promote.

In the US News rankings, the top 20 schools are all private. The first public school on the list is #21, UC Berkeley. If you are familiar with California's public universities (UCLA, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, etc) you know that the UC system is comprised of arguably the best schools in the country. Students in California, to all appearances, consider their public universities to be on the same level as Stanford & Caltech. However, according to US News, UC Berkeley warrants 21^st place in the rankings while Stanford is 4^th, and Caltech is 5^th.

The reason why public schools fare so badly in the rankings is quite simple. The criteria with which US News ranks colleges is not at all designed to give public schools a chance in the rankings. US News uses criteria such as: Retention Rate, Graduation Rate, Class Size, Selectivity, and Peer Assessments to rank colleges.

Perhaps you can now see why public schools do not fare as well in the rankings. US News does not use measures which would mean more to prospective students. As a college student, I don't really care how many of my classmates decide to donate money after graduation, or how selective my school was during my application year. I would rather know: job placement statistics for alumni, graduate school placements, graduate exam test scores, etc. US News does not measure actual academic factors when ranking schools. Rather, it focuses on criteria which are designed to "fail" public colleges from the get go.

Retention rate, refers to the percent of freshmen who return to a university after their freshman year. In public colleges, this percentage is lower. The graduation rate of public schools is also lower than that of private schools. However, I have an explanation for these two phenomena. Public college students are not all as financially well off as their private school counterparts. Many students in public colleges find that after one year they cannot afford college, and they have to drop out. I was very nearly in this situation myself. I have known public college students who did not graduate on time because they had to take a semester off to earn money to finish college.

On class size and selectivity, these two factors should not be used as a measure of a college's "worth" when comparing private and public colleges. It is obvious that public schools accept more students than private colleges. No-one can argue this fact. Exactly how is a public school, which accepts more than 1500 new students each year, supposed to compete with a private school which accepts about 700 new students each year? Knowing that public colleges are practically obliged to accept more than twice the number of students at private colleges, why would US News use class size and selectivity when comparing private and public schools? Public colleges were not designed to be as "selective" as private colleges. The class size and selectivity criteria clearly favor private colleges.

Peer Assessments, refer to the way colleges in the same "category" view each other. Does anyone else see a problem in allowing schools to rank other schools? To me, this reeks of laziness. If US News really wants to rank colleges, why don't they go to every single school? Why would you allow professors at rival colleges to rank each other?

I would hope that next year US News takes a bit more care in ranking colleges. Over the last couple of years I have seen public schools move higher in the rankings, but not high enough to really reflect the caliber of students and alumni that they produce. Although US News does have a separate ranking for public schools, it is not as comprehensive as their "joint" public and private rankings. Their public school rankings rate only the top 50 in the country. A clear indicator of just how biased the college rankings are, can be seen by looking at the graduate school rankings. The graduate school rankings use a better methodology and give a more academic and fair comparison of schools. From the graduate school rankings it can be seen that public universities are not as bad as they are made out to be.

My advice to high school seniors this fall is; decide wisely. There is so much more to a college than what US News reports in its biased rankings. My decision to attend my current college was based on my future career goals and my financial status. I had the opportunity to attend an ivy-league school in Boston. But I turned them down. Why? Because I plan to go to medical school, and it does not make sense for me to get into mountains of debt in my undergraduate years when medical school is expensive enough. I managed to find a public school that provides excellent biological research opportunities, a good reputation, and an affordable price. Don't knock the publics till you've tried them.