For anyone curious about the standing of American colleges, who more often than not may be prospective students, a quick Google search will unveil everything you’re looking for.
Sources ranging from reputable news sites to Reddit forums offer their opinions and rankings on the best colleges in the United States. But this jumble of information should be consumed with caution.
These rankings, some based on personal opinion and others on particular criteria, can sway people’s perception of schools and students’ choice of which universities to apply to.
Last month, Lehigh University was ranked the 15th best college in the U.S. by The Wall Street Journal, a one-spot decrease from last year’s ranking.
However, the growing complexity of higher education has revealed significant flaws in how these rankings are calculated. Far from being objective measures of quality, college rankings can often mislead students into believing a certain ranking will determine the overall prestige of the institution.
We think it’s time to question the validity of these rankings and whether or not they should be considered as meaningful to one’s experience at a given college.
When college rankings are assembled, factors such as academic reputation, financial resources, alumni donations and acceptance rates often carry a heavy weight.
The Wall Street Journal uses these methodologies: student outcomes account for 70%, learning environment accounts for 20% and diversity accounts for 10%.
Keeping this in mind, Lehigh’s ranking dropped one place, which may hold some significance.
The difference may come down to adjustments in the way some of the criteria was weighted, which could explain the different results this year.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean Lehigh did “worse” this year compared to last year.
A ranking is just a number.
This brings us to one of our criticisms of college rankings, which is their overemphasis on inputs rather than outcomes.
For example, metrics like student selectivity or alumni donations don’t necessarily reflect what students will gain from their attendance at their respective universities.
A selective institution may excel at admitting higher-achieving students, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the university will provide a better means of education or support for that student, nor does it mean that the accepted student will enjoy attending that institution.
Rather than looking at these external markers and rankings that supposedly determine prestige, we should rather focus on criteria like student satisfaction, post-graduation employment rates and, less quantifiably, the development of career and life skills.
The strict fixation on rankings and reputation is often built on the back of historical prestige, further skewing the rankings of older and more established universities. This reinforces the status quo, where a handful of elite institutions dominate the top tiers year after year.
Consequently, universities with smaller endowments or less stature can often be sidelined, which can lead prospective students to overlook such institutions in favor of one ranked higher that they deem “better.”
This isn’t to discredit prestigious universities, but it serves as a conversation to allow people to see beyond the numbers.
Moreover, different ranking systems provide inconsistent results, further diminishing their reliability.
For instance, Lehigh is currently ranked 46th out of 436 national Universities by U.S. News and World Report, a significant difference than its standing according to The Wall Street Journal.
This discrepancy arises because various publications weigh each criteria differently.
If a single university can occupy such vastly different positions on different lists, how can students be expected to rely on ranking systems as a basis for such an important decision?
They can’t, and they shouldn’t.
College rankings provide a narrow and misleading view of universities. They encourage a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to align with the varying needs, goals and expectations of individual students applying to colleges.
The true measure of a university isn’t where it stands on a list competing with other schools, but the impact it has on students’ lives. Rankings will never capture that.
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