Here’s my analysis of USNWR’s ranking criteria & weights. I’ve rearranged the criteria and regrouped them into themes that lend perspective on the rat race, and I added my thoughts on how colleges can (or cannot) manipulate the criteria.
** 22.5% “Your incumbent Congressman always gets reelected” **
- 15.0% College peer assessment survey
- 7.5% High school counselors’ ratings
Nearly a quarter of the USNWR ranking is based on a popularity poll by college administrators and HS guidance counselors. Once a college is ranked, it’s nigh impossible to budge it for the same reason your Congressman always gets reelected no matter how awful he/she is: INCUMBENCY. If Penn State didn’t get dinged in the popularity polls for its leadership covering up 15 years of child molestation, then little known schools like UMBC don’t have a chance in Hades to move up.
** 25.1% “Buy your way up” **
- 10.0% Financial resources per student
- 8.1% SAT/ACT scores
- 7.0% Faculty compensation
Another quarter of the ranking is based on how rich a school already is. Unless the Endowment Fairy suddenly puts another billion dollars under your pillow overnight, you’re not going to be entering your yacht in this race. I included SAT/ACT scores in this bucket because at 1/12 of the overall weighting, test scores are weightier than faculty paychecks. With a fat merit-money fund, if the college can pay… then the college can play. Northeastern & USC have rocketed up the rankings by playing this card well.
** 30.0% “Don’t upset the customers” **
- 18.0% Average graduation rate
- 7.5% Graduation rate performance
- 4.5% Average first-year student retention rate
A whopping 30% is simply making sure the customer is happy. USNWR generously awards schools for keeping their customers from leaving. One shortcut colleges can employ to manipulate this metric is grade inflation. UN Chapel Hill deserves a special gold medal for handing out free A’s in fake courses for basketball players for nearly 2 decades. High five!
** 13.0% “Rearranging deck chairs” **
- 8.0% Class size
- 3% Percent Faculty w terminal degree in their field
- 1% Psrcent Faculty that are fulltime
- 1% Student-faculty ratio
USNRW doesn’t ding schools for using part-time instructors (1% weighting). The school just needs to pay them well. A school could balance more part time hirees w more pay to get the avg class size down. The low weighting for Percent Faculty w a terminal degree reflects that it’s a buyer’s market: PhDs are cheap and plentiful.
Other stuff:
- 5.0% Average alumni giving rate
- 3.1% High school class standing in top 10%
- 1.3% Acceptance rate
Alumni trump valedictorians any day. Acceptance rate is the size of rounding error.