Reevaluating College Rankings: Defining "Best" in Higher Education
Last week, US News & World Report published their much anticipated (and, of late, much questioned) 2022 Best College Rankings. The top colleges are the usual suspects and, at this point, are so routinely chosen, I don’t need to list names. You already know the institutions. And this, I think, should strike us as odd. Yale University is this year’s “Best Value School.” Yale. A school with an average estimated cost of $81,575 per year is US News & World Report’s best value school. This is not an argument that an education from Yale isn’t worth $80,000, or that said education wouldn’t be valuable; I am questioning, though, the use of broad yet subjective terms like “value” or “best.”
The problem of “best” is similar to that of “beauty”—its definition rests squarely in the eye of the beholder. This is not a new idea; The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The New Yorker have all published pieces examining the veracity and validity of college rankings, and have mostly drawn the same conclusion—that assigning a single numerical point value to an entire university is reductive and oversimplifying a much more nuanced situation. Perhaps a more accurate title for US News & World Report’s List would be “Schools with the Best Name Recognition” or “Schools Whose Graduates Make the Most Money Within 10 Years of Graduation”. For some, these designations would be synonymous with “best,” but for others “best” might look more like “Schools with the Highest Graduation Rates for Adults Over 30,” “Schools with the Highest Level of Immediate Career Placement,” or even “Schools with On-Campus Childcare.”
How can it be that the colleges ranking in the top 10 have hardly changed since 1983, yet the national economy, access to technology, and student demographics have all changed substantially? This isn’t a swing at the Ivy League; it is an earnest question. Is it reasonable to tell prospective students all over the world that the best college they can hope to attend has an admissions rate of 5%, is located in New Jersey, and costs $73,450 per year? Maybe your answer to this question is yes. Maybe your definition of “Best” most closely resembles “Most Appropriate Backdrop for Reenacting the Movie ‘The Skulls,’” which is fine, as long as we can be up-front about how we’re defining the word.
My own alma mater, the University of Iowa (go Hawks!), is currently ranked #109 in “Value.” During my four years as a student there, my classes were flexible enough to allow me to work at the University’s hospital, and the surrounding areas were inexpensive enough that I could live off-campus. I was able to build a resume, attend classes taught by engaging experts (a particularly exciting opportunity for 20-year-old me was the ability to attend classes taught by students in the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop), and ultimately graduated without any student loan debt. For this snow-loving, debt-hating, book nerd, The University of Iowa should have been rated #1 Best Value School.
The problem with the current ranking system boils down to this: the existence of a “Best” implies the existence of the equally subjective “Worst.” University of Montana is currently ranked #277. Do students there feel the weight of attending a school ranked in the bottom third of US News and World Report’s list? Hopefully not, since UM actually has some pretty impressive academic distinctions and boasts an in-state tuition rate of $7,354 per year.
Rankings have value because we assign them value. US News and World Report’s list has authority because we give it authority. More and more, though, it feels like the absolutism of “best” is becoming irrelevant. How should we define “best”? We owe that answer to our students and ourselves.
