Should I Pay Attention to College Rankings?
College for Christians - Chapter 5
My wife and our daughter are amazing shoppers. They can spend hours at a mall or on a website, studiously comparing and contrasting item after item, picking up on subtle distinctions in quality and style that I’m too rushed or too clueless to recognize. And they’re patient enough to wait for whatever they need to come on sale.
My goal, on the other hand, is always to spend as little time shopping as possible. So I usually either get the same things over and over — or I don’t get anything at all. It’s even worse when I need to get a bigger ticket item, since I frequently worry about money.
So when we were preparing to start a family and had to get a new car, new appliances for our bigger residence, and all the expensive items that babies need to survive, I subscribed to Consumer Reports and resolved to pick whatever that magazine recommended.
For decades now, CR has been dedicated to helping consumers buy everything from cars and cribs to mattresses and microwaves. For almost anything I needed as a new parent, I could go to the CR website and see how the various options stacked up against each other: the price of each, but also its quality and reliability — based on rigorous testing and converted to a score out of the nicely round number of 100.
Using CR made me feel like I was making a rational decision based on clear criteria, rather than a foolish buy driven by impulse, impatience, or whatever advertisers had convinced me to believe. Because it made shopping almost scientific, I felt more confident and less stressed.
So while I still don’t think you should think of yourself primarily as a customer when choosing a college, I do understand why people facing that choice sometimes pay attention to ranking systems. After all, even though metrics do oversimplify reality, every college applicant needs to find some way to make an incredibly complicated choice a bit easier. Like a Consumer Reports guide to new cars, an annually-updated list of the country’s best colleges can seem to take some of the uncertainty and emotion out of a process that feels like the most expensive shopping trip most of us will ever take.
If only it were that easy! Ranking colleges is as complicated and contentious as everything else in higher education. It’s more subjective than scientific, since people disagree about which criteria matter, how to measure them, and how to compare the results to each other. And for Christians, the leading rankings systems aren’t even asking the questions that may be most important.
Ranking vs. Rating
As a teenager, I was a strong student at a college prep school. So when I started my college search, I resolved to consider only the 100 best options — as determined by a magazine then still known as U.S. News and World Report. Nowadays, there’s not much of a magazine left, but every autumn college presidents nervously wait to see how their institutions fared in that year’s U.S. News Best Colleges report, since any movement up or down the USN list may move that school on or off the radar of high schoolers like me. U.S. News claims that at least 100 million people consult its college rankings every year, and colleges and universities collectively pay it millions of dollars for the right to trumpet their places in the USN rankings.
I’ll say more about why I regret my focus on a supposed “Top 100” in ch. 10. But my other mistake was to confuse ranking and rating. While I think it can be helpful to consider the latter, don’t waste your time on the former.
After all, there’s no consensus on what “best” means in higher education. It’s one thing to rank the best refrigerators. Everyone agrees what a fridge is supposed to do, and some models simply keep food cool more reliably and more efficiently than others. But as we’ve already seen, Americans hold very different expectations for college. What causes one college to rank highly for me could make you drop it from your list. The cream of the U.S. News crop may strike you as too expensive or too elitist, too selective or too secular.
But while I’d encourage you not to pay any attention to the difference between #1 and #2, or even #100 vs. #200, such lists do provide one valuable service. Because they annually rate colleges according to different criteria, systems like U.S. News’ gather up-to-date information that may help you to test the claims that colleges make about themselves. As always, the real question is personal: which information matters to you?
To use such rating systems for that purpose, we need to understand how they work. I’ll introduce a couple of alternatives, but let’s start with U.S. News, still the best known and most popular.
Understanding Categories
Let’s start with a quick quiz. According to U.S. News, what is the best college or university in the state of Minnesota? (A) The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. (B) Carleton College. (C) Hamline University. (D) North Central University.
It’s actually (E) All of the above. While I doubt most of you have heard of more than one or two of those institutions, each can claim to rank highest in my home state because each is in a different category.
As U.S. News defines them, universities not only offer a wide range of majors for undergraduates, but also award many graduate degrees. If a university has significant doctoral programs, like the University of Minnesota, it’s treated as a National University and pitted against similar schools around the country. If its graduate school primarily awards master’s degrees, it becomes a Regional University like Hamline and is assigned to a smaller geographic group: North, South, Midwest, or West. Meanwhile, colleges focus much more heavily on bachelor’s degrees. If most of a college’s students major in the arts, sciences, or humanities, as they do at Carleton, it enters the National College category. If, like North Central, the school tends to focus on professional programs, it becomes a Regional College and also goes into a smaller, regional pool.
Now, if you want a CR-like score, US News does assign every college an overall rating on a 100-point scale. (In the 2025 ratings, Carleton tops all Minnesota schools with a 93.) But rather than forcing a comparison between apples and oranges, ranking colleges within categories recognizes that different kinds of institutions have different missions and different priorities. North Central is almost next door to the University of Minnesota in downtown Minneapolis, but how do you compare a tiny Pentecostal school renowned for training worship leaders to a massive land-grant university that awards doctorates in everything from art history to veterinary sciences?
So the first thing that’s useful about U.S. News is that it helps you start to understand different types of colleges and universities, then to compare like with like.
Which Ratings Matter?
Each college profile at U.S. News also collects in one place the statistics I mentioned in the last two chapters, like net price, graduation rate, and typical student debt.1 But the second thing to understand about U.S. News and its competitors is that each system emphasizes some criteria and deemphasizes (or ignores) others. While USN has started to pay more attention to colleges’ graduation rates and economic “return on investment,” it still considers the academic caliber of student a school attracts and how much its faculty are paid, neither of which necessarily reflects the teaching or learning that happens there. Most controversially, one-fifth of its ranking points continue to come from subjective peer assessment: U.S. News still asks college leaders to rank rival institutions on a five-point scale. More and more of those leaders are skipping that survey, but for now, a school’s reputation among people who have never studied or taught in its classrooms or labs can still count for more than its graduation rate.
Add in the points that go to financial resources, and you’ll start to see why the colleges and universities that tend to fare best in all categories of the U.S. News rankings are those that are already well-known and well-resourced — the rich and the famous of higher ed. “It shouldn’t be called best colleges,” complains Walter Kimbrough of Morehouse College, a leading historically Black school. “Call it America’s most privileged colleges.”
If reputation and wealth don’t strike you as being important measures of a college’s quality, then consider alternatives to U.S. News that are meant to shift the spotlight to less famous, less wealthy schools. Instead of including measures of student quality entering college, both focus on student outcomes after they leave college. For example, the business magazine Forbes gives higher scores to colleges and universities that retain their students, graduate them on time, and send their alumni into higher-paying jobs with less debt.
Alas, it also lumps all types of institutions together, forcing readers to compare dissimilar schools. And while Forbes takes a different approach than U.S. News, the results look awfully familiar. In 2024, all eight Ivies were still in the Forbes top 20, along with other elite private institutions like Stanford and Johns Hopkins — plus just two public universities belonging to the same state system (California’s). In part, that’s because the Forbes system factors in other criteria that tend to reflect academic reputation, like its students’ ability to get into PhD programs or earn elite scholarships.2 Likewise, Forbes gives 15% of its points to a school’s track record in preparing leaders in business, politics, culture, and sports — lists regularly dominated by alumni from a handful of colleges and universities.
A more radical alternative to the U.S. News rankings comes from a more obscure magazine, Washington Monthly. For 2024 WM’s list of the top 60 National Universities doesn’t just include Ivies and “public Ivies” like Wisconsin-Madison and California-Berkeley, but the leading Mormon university, Brigham Young, and two of its less selective public neighbors: the University of Utah and Utah State University. Maybe most surprising is National Louis University in Chicago (#55 in 2024), which has a historic commitment to serving students from lower-income families, admits over 90% of its applicants, and languishes at the bottom of the U.S. News list.
What accounts for the difference? Washington Monthly gives equal weight to three measures of a college’s contribution to the public good: social mobility (does it help its students improve their socio-economic circumstances?), research (do its faculty and alumni create and apply knowledge?), and service (are its students and alumni engaged in civic life and community service?). So like Forbes, WM also emphasizes post-college work — but gives special weight to schools whose graduates are more interested in service or scholarship than affluence or leadership. It pays attention to affordability — but boosts schools that do especially well by students from lower-income households.3
Starting with its 2024 rankings, even U.S. News adjusted its methodology to account for social mobility, resulting in big boosts for less prestigious state universities like Fresno State and Florida Atlantic. Of course, those same changes meant that some elite universities lost ground. Vanderbilt University, for example, quickly emailed its alumni to blame its five-spot drop on “the lack of rigor and competence that has increasingly characterized U.S. News’ annual lists.”
What About Christian Colleges?
One other consequence of my preference for U.S. News “Top 100” schools was that I was a Christian teenager who never gave a moment’s thought to attending a Christian college. Not North Park University in Chicago, my denomination’s school, nor Bethel or any of Minnesota’s other religious colleges. Meanwhile, I did apply to U.S. News-topping Harvard, but never even considered “the evangelical Harvard”: Wheaton College, a highly selective Christian liberal arts school that typically rates well according to several of the U.S. News criteria, but does not crack the top 50 in its category.
There are excellent Catholic universities higher up traditional rankings, like the University of Notre Dame and Boston College. But here too, I think Washington Monthly may be more helpful to readers of this book. Notably, its most recent Liberal Arts College list again placed two Lutheran colleges in Minnesota, St. Olaf and Gustavus Adolphus, above Carleton, their more famous, and more famously non-sectarian, neighbor.
Again, it’s not the rankings themselves that are important, but that they reflect strong ratings in categories that may matter to Christian families. For example, you may appreciate that a Christian commitment to justice, diversity, and equity prompts colleges as pricey and selective as Gustavus and St. Olaf to make themselves more affordable for lower-income families and to help students who didn’t have high SAT/ACT scores to graduate on time. If you feel that God is calling you (see ch. 13) into what WM celebrates as “socially valuable fields that are not always highly paid,” you might pay more attention to religious colleges that specialize in fields like education, health care, social work, counseling, or church ministry itself. Or if you believe that inquiry and discovery are themselves ways of knowing and glorifying our Creator God, then you might be intrigued that Hope College — a Reformed school in Michigan — rates a bit better in research than such prominent secular colleges as Bates, Earlham, and Kenyon.
But none of these systems can gauge how a college does on some of the measures that matter most to many Christian families. U.S. News can tell you if a college recruits high-achieving teenagers and pays its faculty well, but not if those students and teachers value spiritual growth as much as intellectual formation. Forbes can tell you if a college’s graduates become leaders in their field, but not if their work advances a heavenly kingdom where the last are first and the first last. Washington Monthly can tell you how committed a college is to research or public service, but not whether it helps followers of Jesus to wrestle with the complicated relationships between faith and science or church and state.
So we’ll talk about other ways to assess whether Christian colleges do what they say they do. But we should also bear in mind that this won’t ever be easy. If I’ve learned anything from teaching college students for twenty years, it’s that the most important outcomes for colleges — unlike refrigerators — are usually the hardest to measure.
I’ll pause next week while we celebrate Christmas. Look for our next chapter just before New Year’s: “Should I Consider a Public Option?”
Plus lots of other numbers that you’ll need to pay to see. Much of what goes into the U.S. News rankings is opaque unless you’re a subscriber.
Almost half of the nation’s Rhodes Scholars come from the eight Ivy League universities.
For example, Washington Monthly rewards universities whose actual graduation rate outperforms what would be expected based on the demographics of the student body.