College Rankings Are Meaningless, So Here’s A College ‘Ranking’*

Did You Know That Water Is Wet?

Recently, Michael Thaddeus, Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University, chose to focus his expertise and experience on challenging the integrity and accuracy of the data provided by Columbia to the U.S. News & World Report for the publication’s 2022 annual college rankings. Professor Thaddeus’s insights are illuminating, if deflating, but they are also largely moot. While rankings hold a lot of power and sway within U.S. higher education, they are, in all candor, utterly absurd; which, incidentally, is the best, and arguably only argument for Thaddeus to have even cared enough to apply university department funding and resources to expose his employer’s gamesmanship tactics within what can only be referred to as a game – indeed, a silly, petty game of musical chairs, consisting of unclear rules and unclearer results.**     

Hate The Game, Not The Players

To provide but one example of the dubiousness of college rankings, consider the following: California-based CalTech is a tiny, almost exclusively STEM-focused university that, despite its size and relative youth – founded in 1891 – has graduated, employed, and collaborated with the greatest number, per student capita, of Nobel Prize laureates among all U.S. colleges, albeit mostly at the graduate level and mostly in the natural sciences. Connecticut-based Yale, which is much larger and much older – founded in 1701 – and a top Nobel Prize-affiliated university as well – has produced, after Harvard, the second greatest number of U.S. Presidents and U.S. Supreme Court Justices; whereas CalTech has yet to graduate a single U.S. President or U.S. Supreme Court Justice. 

Now, given this information, try to objectively determine which of the two colleges provides the better education at large.

Seems silly, no?

Sure, you can absolutely argue that the given information — including the rather unique characteristics of affiliated and/or graduated Nobel Prize laureates and U.S. Presidents and U.S. Supreme Court Justices — represent extreme, outlying metrics that really cannot be compared. And you’d be correct: after all, only so many people become president of the United States or a Nobel Prize laureate (unless of course you’re Barack Obama). Nevertheless, try as you might, qualifying any one education against another, even if by attempting to focus on presumed ‘leveling’ quantitative metrics, such as graduation rates, starting salaries, alumni contributions, etc., only makes the exercise all the more complicatedly futile. But don’t tell that to the profiteering U.S. News & World Report (unless the U.S. News & World Report rebuts that it somehow has been attending every college it ranks, simultaneously, year after year after year, since 1983. Even if this impossibility were the case, the frame of reference would be offered by only one attendee: hardly grounds for statistical significance).   

While Columbia is a current rankings culprit, it’s just one of many elite universities ‘exposed’ for their gaming approaches. [Sidebar: Expect to see in the coming months many colleges quietly revising their own data submissions to the U.S. News & World Report, should the colleges fail to take a higher road by altogether refraining from participating in the rankings.] 

Way back in 2002, Princeton egregiously violated FERPA by hacking into Yale’s student applicants’ online profiles in order to ascertain a handful of Yale’s admissions decisions for Yale’s incoming class of 2006. Why would such a venerable institution such as Princeton hack the information of a rival institution – an institution, mind you, that was violating FERPA in its own way – over a handful of student acceptances or rejections? If Yale believed in its candidates enough to offer admissions invitations to them, then why would the admissions invitations offered by other universities to those same candidates matter? One reason is that yield rates of matriculating students factor into the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings criteria. Basically, as the logic goes, a higher yield rate indicates a higher desire to attend the school, which somehow makes the school better. [It should be noted that Princeton is by far the most consistently-favored national undergraduate institution by the U.S. News & World Report.]

Whether universities will elect not to participate in future rankings remains to be seen. The problem is that there is an enormous demand for college rankings – from prospective students and their parents, to hedging colleges, to contributing alumni and hiring companies. And where there’s demand, revenue-generating media outlets like the U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal – each with its own rankings “methodology” – are more than happy to supply. 

Rankings Don’t Matter, But Where You Went to School Sometimes Does 

Ultimately, most major hiring corporations tend not to bother much with rankings. Rightly or wrongly, these companies have well-established relationships – often geographically convenient in nature – with their favorite elite colleges (e.g., Stanford in Silicon Valley; Georgetown on the D.C. political Beltway; NYU on Wall Street). Similarly, while alumni from elite colleges might experience a bout of pride should their alma mater improve in a news publication’s rankings – which can provide a much-welcomed boost in a college’s seasonal fund-raising efforts – most alums really couldn’t care less about how their alma mater ranks, primarily because there is solace in their brand buy-ins. In other words, alums of elite colleges already know they have not only a seat at the ‘adults’ table,’ but also a shared seat at the head of it. A graduate from Yale, who went on to become a corporate attorney on Wall Street, and a graduate from CalTech, who went on to become a research scientist at NASA, tend not to bat an eye over whoever so condescends to compare and contrast their respective undergraduate educations, much less rank them.   

While industry and higher education (including its administrations, faculties, students, alumni, and affiliates) are quite aware of who’s seated at the table, many prospective students – especially international and first-generation college students (and their parents) – typically know very little about what makes a particular school ‘elite.’ Run a few simple searches on Google, or take a cautionary plunge into a Reddit rabbit hole, and you will almost instantly gain some insight into just how uninformed and/or misinformed many people appear to be. Of course, who can blame them? Aside from the annual rankings trumpeted – including by way of heavily paid for SEO-optimization – by a handful of for-profit publications, what classifies a college as elite and why? 

‘Elite’ Is Relative (Or Is It?)

Definitionally, ‘elite’ means the best, as considered collectively. In this case, ‘collectively’ means not only within the collective (e.g., the colleges, themselves) vs. outsiders (e.g., any given multimedia conglomerate), but also – and here’s the clincher – by “a group [] exercising the major share of authority or influence within [that] larger group.” (This is a fancy way of saying, “You can’t sit with us.”) 

Naturally, ‘Mean-Girling’ one another calls into question lack of impartiality, self-serving self-selectivity, intrinsic conflicts of interest, not to mention the very merits, if any, of cache and repute. However, like it or not, and as imperfect, unfair, and unnecessary as such popularizing might be, it’s still more effective – at minimum, on principle – than any ‘assessment’’ made by an outsider. No doubt, higher education is riddled with flaws, failures, inconsistencies, scandals, bureaucracy, bluster, righteousness, arrogance, and insularity. But higher education does have a well-documented history of progressiveness and reformation: the traditional values and virtues of academia, though now tested like never before, have played a major role in this evolution, however glacial.

So Without Further Ado (When In All Actuality Ado Is Anything But ‘Further’)

Firstly, and really ‘only,’ a superior education can be obtained most anywhere: NEVER diminish or forget this. 

<pause to process this>

That said, the reality is that elitism – however defined, deigned, or dignified – exists within higher education. The following list of elite colleges is subjective, as any one list would be, but it has a solid tenability to it in that the colleges have, by and large, already self-identified over the decades, centuries in most cases. Include the Ivy League (e.g., Brown, Dartmouth, Penn), the remaining Seven Sisters (e.g., Smith, Barnard, Wellesley), the Ivy-Plus (e.g., Stanford, Duke, Chicago), the STEM powerhouses (e.g., MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon), the Liberal Arts bulwarks (e.g., Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore), the prominent U.S. Military colleges (e.g., West Point, Annapolis, Air Force), the state-funded, global research magnets (e.g. Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan), and the renowned arts schools (e.g., Juilliard, Parsons, RISD), and the list almost entirely compiles itself. 

There are several debatable inclusions on the list; then again, fundamentally, aren’t they all debatable? These debatable inclusions are very much anticipated to be contested, particularly by students, alumni, and/or affiliates of several debatable exclusions. Fair. Beyond fair. But isn’t this indicative of the very essence of elitism? You’re either in or you’re not. <insert eyeroll here>

Whether or not you give a flying f@ck, here’s ‘the’ list, in the only suitable order (read: alphabetical):   

Amherst 

Barnard 

Bowdoin 

Brown

Bryn Mawr 

CalTech 

Carnegie Mellon 

Claremont McKenna 

Columbia 

Cooper Union 

Cornell 

Dartmouth 

Duke 

Emory 

Georgetown 

Harvard  

Johns Hopkins 

Julliard 

MIT 

Northwestern 

Notre Dame

NYU

Parsons 

Pomona 

Princeton 

Rice 

RISD 

Smith 

Stanford 

Swarthmore 

Tufts 

U.S. Air Force Academy 

U.S. Military Academy 

U.S. Naval Academy 

University of California, Berkeley 

University of California, Los Angeles ​

University of Chicago 

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 

University of Pennsylvania 

University of Southern California

University of Virginia

Vanderbilt 

Vassar  

Wake Forest

Washington University 

Wellesley 

Wesleyan 

Williams 

Yale​

*The purpose of this article is threefold: 1) Ignore, or at least question, rankings; 2) Know what the elite undergraduate institutions are (and why), because, like it or not, elitism within U.S. higher education is a deeply entrenched phenomenon; 3) Make your own education decisions based on better information, not necessarily more information.  

**Update: As what can only be viewed as a form of punishment, U.S. News & World Report stupidly included Columbia in its recent 2023 rankings (even though Columbia chose not to report this year in order to self-investigate), placing Columbia at 18th (from 2nd). U.S. News & World Report citied that the data the publication used was from various available sources, thus calling into further question the value of its own rankings ‘methodology.’ In a New York Times article entitled, ‘U.S. News Dropped Columbia’s Ranking, but Its Own Methods Are Now Questioned,’ Professor Thaddeus is quoted: “If any institution can decline from No 2 to No 18 in a single year, it just discredits the whole ranking operation.”

Edward Yaeger is a first-generation college graduate, of Columbia, and a college admissions coach.