In July 2022, we provided a deep dive into college rankings and the investigation into the accuracy of Columbia’s self-reported data for U.S. News and World Report (USNWR). We get many questions about how both USNWR and The Forbes rankings are calculated. Last year’s controversy over accusations from a Columbia professor led the university to initially withdraw from the rankings before being officially pulled by USNWR.
THE TABLES HAVE TURNED
It appears Columbia is now officially done with USNWR. Inside Higher Ed recently reported that Columbia has dropped out of the rankings altogether, joining Colorado College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Stillman College, which have also withdrawn. Will the college rankings shake-up continue? We foresee other colleges likely following suit, considering how misleading the rankings can be (Remember last year, when Harvard dropped out of the Top 10 on the Forbes college rankings?) and the fact that mostly all college data can be found on each college’s respective annual Common Data Sets.
Columbia’s official announcement, makes their position clear:
“We remain concerned with the role that rankings have assumed in the undergraduate application process, both in the outsized influence they may play with prospective students, and in how they distill a university’s profile into a composite of data categories. Much is lost in this approach. The combined population of our three schools, along with the presence of students from affiliate institutions, in classrooms and across many aspects of student life, is intrinsic to the undergraduate experience at Columbia. We are convinced that synthesizing data into a single U.S. News submission for its Best Colleges rankings does not adequately account for all of the factors that make our undergraduate programs exceptional.”
Remember that college rankings are merely one metric by which to “measure” a college or university. At Top Tier Admissions, we look beyond this easily manipulated data to help students identify which factors matter most to them and prioritize personal “fit,” the most important metric of all.