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Education United States

US News Makes Money From Some of Its Biggest Critics: Colleges 29

Jonathan Henry, a vice president at the University of Maine at Augusta, is hoping that an email will arrive this month. He is also sort of dreading it. The message, if it comes, will tell him that U.S. News & World Report has again ranked his university's online programs among the nation's best. History suggests the email will also prod the university toward paying U.S. News, through a licensing agent, thousands of dollars for the right to advertise its rankings. The New York Times: For more than a year, U.S. News has been embroiled in another caustic dispute about the worthiness of college rankings -- this time with dozens of law and medical schools vowing not to supply data to the publisher, saying that rankings sometimes unduly influence the priorities of universities. But school records and interviews show that colleges nevertheless feed the rankings industry, collectively pouring millions of dollars into it.

Many lower-profile colleges are straining to curb enrollment declines and counter shrinking budgets. And any endorsement that might attract students, administrators say, is enticing. Maine at Augusta spent $15,225 last year for the right to market U.S. News "badges" -- handsome seals with U.S. News's logo -- commemorating three honors: the 61st-ranked online bachelor's program for veterans, the 79th-ranked online bachelor's in business and the 104th-ranked online bachelor's. Mr. Henry, who oversees the school's enrollment management and marketing, said there was just too much of a risk of being outshined and out-marketed by competing schools that pay to flash their shiny badges. "If we could ignore them, wouldn't that be grand?" Mr. Henry said of U.S. News. "But you can't ignore the leviathan that they are."

Nor can colleges ignore how families evaluate schools. "The Amazonification of how we judge a product's quality," he said, has infiltrated higher education, as consumers and prospective students alike seek order from chaos. The money flows from schools large and small. The University of Nebraska at Kearney, which has about 6,000 students, bought a U.S. News "digital marketing license" for $8,500 in September. The Citadel, South Carolina's military college, moved in August to spend $50,000 for the right to use its rankings online, in print and on television, among other places. In 2022, the University of Alabama shelled out $32,525 to promote its rankings in programs like engineering and nursing. Critics believe that the payments, from schools of any size and wealth, enable and incentivize a ranking system they see as harmful.
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US News Makes Money From Some of Its Biggest Critics: Colleges

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  • Propose a better system? In ANY ranking system people not getting #1 are going to grumble. These days people can't handle that they're second place in anything. People need a way of knowing which colleges are better.. Somebody has to do survey for that, and doing those surveys is not cheap -- it involves randomly sampling employers, academia, ex-students, random people etc . Someone has to pay for that.

    • Re:OK.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @10:42AM (#64140909)
      Just a short list of a few of the problems with the "ranking" system:

      -Most people only attend one school. So it's impossible to provide any meaningful comparison.
      -The average high school GPA / test score has little to do with the EXPERIENCE you have there (or if you learn anything at all). It tells you a little bit about who your classmates might be, although at larger schools there are "honors" programs where the top students are all separated out so you don't really see them that much.
      -Research expenditures (a major factor in graduate college and medical / professional rankings) have almost nothing to do with your undergraduate experience and little to do with most graduate school experiences (perhaps this isn't true if you are doing research in a specific area).
      -Reputation scores (another major portion of the ranking index) are based heavily on people's recall of last year's rankings.
      -US News routinely changes the weight and inclusion of various factors for no good reason and with no evidence that the factors they use in the rankings have any meaningful association with institutional quality.
      • I can't speak for anyone else's evaluation of Universities, other than many many of my peers made absurd financial decisions just because one university was more fun or because their friends went there. However, The data US News provides is very valuable. You're highlighting some of the problems with some of the ranking metrics, but they do provide the breakdown of the rankings giving access to the details you find important and allowing a student to devise their own rankings based on what is important to
        • Re:OK.. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @12:13PM (#64141233)

          The data US News provides is very valuable

          The US Department of Education provides more data for free: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/find... [ed.gov]

          I agree that data are useful in making a college decision (such as price, majors and programs offered, average time to degree, graduation rates, etc.), but the US News rankings are not useful because they do not include any of these factors! The US News criteria are also easily manipulated (Clemson famously bragged about improving their ranking by gaming the rankings system).

          In addition to freely-available data (not rankings data), I also recommend meeting in person with a couple faculty members from the program that interests you, sitting in on a class or two, meeting with any advisors or leaders of extracurricular activities that interest you (such as marching band). That will get you much better insight into a place than any random rankings system.

          • In addition to freely-available data (not rankings data), I also recommend meeting in person with a couple faculty members from the program that interests you, sitting in on a class or two, meeting with any advisors or leaders of extracurricular activities that interest you (such as marching band).

            Those seem like great options, after you've used a ranking system to narrow your choices to a manageable list.

        • I sit on the advisory board for a college and US News ranking are always a topic at least once a year. They are totally pay to play and a lot of the things that drive rankings are utterly useless. Which is why more and more schools and saying enough with them.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I think regularly changing what gets rated without warning is justifiable as a measure to keep groups from gaming the rating system. That the measures may have no relation to the quality, however, is a very different matter.

        OTOH, who *should* do the rating, and how should they do it? But people need SOME grounds for making a decision. Perhaps a lousy system is better than random selection.

        • I think regularly changing what gets rated

          Changing what gets rated indicates that those doing the rating do not know what makes an institution good.

          For instance, if the number of research publications produced by your faculty in a year = a better quality institution, then that should be included in your rankings criteria consistently over time. If you include that for a few years, then don't include it, then include it at a lower weight in the overall score, then you include only certain publications, then you include them all, then you remove bo

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      In ANY ranking system people not getting #1 are going to grumble.

      One? I'm pissed I didn't make the top 25 employees in our org. I'd be more than happy with #2.

      (And no jokes about the org only having 25 employees.)

  • Universities and colleges, send a mere $5,000 to me and I'll put you at the top of my ranking list web page ahead of whomever else most recently paid $5,000; that's far cheaper than US News &WR scammers!

  • by echo123 ( 1266692 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @10:41AM (#64140903)

    The Varsity Blues Scandal [wikipedia.org] has recently proven this, (as if no one knew the problem previously existed).

  • You don't need a university degree to know that.
    • by SpzToid ( 869795 )
      Does US News & World Report exist if not for the college rankings? Seriously? When else is US News & World Report of any relevance or ranking on and of itself in that last few decades? When was that last time you actually read an article from the US News & World Report [wikipedia.org], (it has been around since forever).
      • by spudnic ( 32107 )

        They rank all kinds of things. Hospitals, States, communities; you name it, they rank it!

        Now what else do they do besides come out with all of these rankings? No clue.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Around 1970. I can't be more specific, and I don't remember what it was about.

      • U.S. News used to be a weekly news magazine until 2008, when it reduced frequency of publication until it folded entirely in 2015. I recall it was a pretty bland middle of the road publication (sort of like Newsweek before it too shut down as a weekly paper magazine). Basically, the whole business model of a weekly news magazine ended (with a few niche exceptions like The Economist). The rankings thing was originally a side project of the news magazine but was sufficiently popular that it eventually eclipse

  • The US education system will give you the best degree your money can buy.

  • by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @03:14PM (#64141793)

    Lost amid the hoopla is that U.S. News Rankings are not terribly relevant for the vast majority of prospective students. Most students are going to attend college in their home town, or at least the home state. You don't need a magazine to tell you that the local commuter school is a local commuter school or the flagship state U is the flagship State U. A ranking that says that Flagship State A is "better" than Flagship State B is only relevant if you are college shopping nationally.

    If you are college shopping nationally, you are typically one of three categories: 1) a top student who is looking at an elite institution, 2) a mediocre but wealthy student looking to buy their way into a flagship state university or private equivalent, 3) someone with special interests/needs like a specific religious affiliation. Most type 1 students don't need a ranking to tell them that Princton is considered more Prestigeous than Brown. The year-to-year fluctuations that put Stanford ahead of MIT or vise versa are just noise. The type 2 students don't need a magazine to tell them that LSU is a fallback if they can't get into A&M. For the type 3s, the ranking of BYU relative to anyone else is irrelevant to a Mormon.

    The only place where U.S. News can offer some edification is to have a convenient list of the prestigious but not necessarily nationally famous schools (especially in the liberal arts camp). Not that many laypeople outside of the Northeast have heard of Swarthmore or Amherst, but someone just starting their college search could see that they are at the top of the liberal arts ranking and near-Ivy for admissions competitiveness. That information could be relevant for a top student with a national search who is looking to add to their list beyond the internationally famous names like Harvard.

    But even then, there's a fundamental absurdity to comparing schools that exist for completely different purposes. For example, they did (maybe still do) rank the military academies against the "liberal arts" schools, but I wager very few people gunning for West Point are seriously considering Amherst as an alternative. Likewise, few Caltech applicants are cross-shopping with Brown, so why should anybody care that one or the other is ranked a few slits above/below?

  • Unless I'm missing something these are universities spending a few tens of thousands on some marketing stuff. This is peanuts for a marketing spend for a large org. Like a rounding error in terms of what they'd spend annually. What am I missing?

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