Three Georgia schools crack top 100 of U.S. News college rankings

Universities often tout a high ranking, or a ranking in any category, using them in press releases and advertisements to recruit prospective students. “It’s nice to be able to say that you’re one of the best. And then you can market that in all sorts of ways,” said Nicholas Bowman, a professor of higher education at the University of Iowa.

While many parents value the lists, hoping their kids get accepted into highly ranked schools, the system has its fair share of critics. In a recent survey by Kaplan, the global education company, 70% of college admissions officers said that rankings have “lost some of their prestige over the last couple of years.” Some schools have withdrawn from the U.S. News rankings, arguing the rating formula is flawed.

“Rankings appear to be data driven, but there’s a lot of human judgment involved,” said Soubhik Barari, a researcher methodologist at the University of Chicago. “Not only are the weights subjective, but they’re changing every year. And so if a college’s rank changes from year to year, you can’t really tell if it’s the college changing, or the weights changing, or the methodology changing.”

Categories like student-faculty ratio may seem straightforward, but Bowman said there is no single way for schools to calculate them. By broadening which employees constitute “faculty,” for instance, a school could improve its ratio and thus its ranking.

The rankings also give what Barari called a “false impression of certainty.” Not only are the rankings working with imperfect information, but it’s also not clear how much of a gap there is between the top-rated school versus No. 10 versus No. 30 and so on.

Bowman cautions students and parents against choosing colleges based upon the topline number in the rankings. “Especially if people are making decisions like, ‘Oh well, this institution is 36, but this one is only 38.’ That sort of distinction isn’t really meaningful,” he said.

Instead, they should look at the more detailed data the ranking system compiles, allowing them to base their decision on metrics that matter most to them. For instance, the U.S. News ranking measures the median debt students have upon graduating. “For some families, that’s going to be really important,” Bowman said. UGA and Emory both had average debts of less than $19,000 per student, while Georgia Tech’s was more than $21,000.

U.S. News says that the data it offers, “lets you compare one school with another and find the differences that matter to you.” It calls the rankings a tool that can be used to select schools but shouldn’t be the sole basis for choosing a college.

Jeongeun Kim, a higher education professor at the University of Maryland, said there is a lot of information to consider when choosing a college. “Rankings become useful in the sense that it reduces information into a very simple number,” she said. “I wouldn’t solely rely on that number in particular.”