College Presidents: Take a Public Stand on U.S. News Rankings Scandal

The U.S. News & World Report college rankings scandal stinks to high heaven, which creates a huge opportunity – and need – for college presidents to speak out publicly about the sham the ratings have become. 

And, critically, about what needs to change.

Because if higher education leaders can’t step up and offer some real insight and guidance to their potential customers at a moment like this, American families are likely to end up as permanent captives to a system that distorts and misleads high schoolers about critical life and education decisions.

The revelation of Columbia University’s egregious data falsifications ripped the cover off one of the most obvious false premises in higher education: that universities and colleges can be precisely “ranked,” and that there’s algorithmic clarity about what makes one university better than another.

Another fallacy: that there’s one master ranking that applies to all prospective college students. No matter how many tut-tutting disclaimers it applies to its own rankings, U.S. News needs high schoolers and their parents to believe the fiction that its rankings are universal.

So, what should a college or university president say about all this – and where?

• Start by acknowledging that the much-heralded annual rankings have not been a reliable measure of a college or university’s true value for some time now, if they ever were. Concede that your institution, like many others, has felt compelled to participate or risk being left behind come application season.

• Instead of backing away from the controversy, embrace it. Get your Stats 101 faculty to help you analyze the rankings themselves. Here’s an absurdity: for the 2022–2023 academic year, U.S. News lists three ties among the top 10 schools based on thousands of data points and allegedly complex weightings.  A solid mathematical smackdown will help make the point that these ratings aren’t what they purport to be. 

• Say out loud what you’ve been saying privately: that these detailed ratings do a severe disservice to students, their families, and your institution by forcing you and your team to pursue many of the wrong objectives for the sake of the “rankings.” 

• Did your institution fudge any data? No one believes that Columbia was the only institution that did. It was the only one that got caught. If your team spun a little too hard, this would be a great time to admit it and explain the pressures that led to it. Real credibility would also accrue.

• Make the point that participating in these ranking systems diverts time, energy, and dollars from the actual business at hand, which is education and the development of future leaders for our society. And just as important, this is a chance to highlight positives and metrics that aren’t used in rankings but that have a powerful impact on your students’ education. 

No one is suggesting college presidents go off on an anti-U.S. News rankings crusade. But in concise, direct language, they can and should make clear that they do not endorse a system that can be so readily manipulated, or where honest errors in data collection can and probably do happen all the time. 

Without question, news outlets need higher education leadership’s insight and context here. America’s newsrooms are decimated from two decades of Internet competition – they don’t have that 30-year veteran higher-education reporter on staff anymore, the one who could have helped make sense of this scandal and explained to 11th-graders and their parents what to do about it.

But college presidents and university chancellors can. The right response is to give key audiences a reflective and honest take on this ranking scandal and what to do about it.