Best College Rankings: Are They B.S.?
The U.S. News & World Report rankings of the best colleges are widely read by students who are trying to decide which college they should attend and employers who are trying to decide which colleges they should recruit from. Like all such rankings, the U.S. News rankings are a bit of a beauty of contest in that beauty is definitely in the eyes of the beholder. What makes one school fantastic for me might make it horrible for you. Yet the rankings have traditionally been viewed as an impartial, objective look at the schools. But are they?
Troubling news has emerged that U.S. News is just making up data that they can't obtain legitimately. For example, the president of Sarah Lawrence College is claiming that her school does not use SAT data yet U.S. News insists on including that data in its ranking system. So the way they include it is to estimate that the average student who attends Sarah Lawrence has an SAT school a little below the average student who attends comparable schools. That's definitely not objective and hardly beautiful.
If U.S. News just makes up data, then their rankings of the best colleges to attend are simply bogus. Garbage in, garbage out. Students, employers, and others should disregard the rankings put out by U.S. News. If this proves to be the case with more schools than just Sarah Lawrence, shame on U.S. News. In fact, even if it proves to be the case with just one school, shame on U.S. News.
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