By Spencer Pevsner & Valerie Erde

Before you decide how to apply to college, you need to decide where. With thousands of colleges and universities across the U.S. and overseas, building a college application list can be a daunting task.

Where do you even start?

Many students — and especially their parents! — focus on college rankings as the first step in researching schools. But this isn't the only way to gather information, and it's certainly not the best.

That's because no single number can summarize the relative worth of an institution as complex as a university. It would be like — well, like trying to summarize the worth of a student with just a single SAT or ACT score. You know that your test scores can't possibly capture who you are as a person, so it stands to reason that rankings can't give the full picture of a college, either.

So, let’s do a deep dive into college rankings: What are they good for, how can you use them, and how much credence should you give them?

Let’s get started.

There's More Than One Way to Organize Rankings

Many parents have only heard of one set of rankings: U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges. While this is by far the best-known list, it is by no means the only set of rankings out there. [2024 update: U.S. News revised its college rankings algorithm in 2023. According to a New York Times article about U.S. News’ rankings changes, the most “seismic” shift in how U.S. News revised rankings impacted institutions “involved schools that were not at the extreme ends of the previous rankings, since they were not extraordinarily weak or strong across a sweeping array of criteria. Occupying the ranking’s middle rungs meant that shifts in methodology, like the removal of alumni giving as a criterion, could easily fuel dramatic rises and falls.”

For the record, U.S. News and World Report rankings try to encompass a pretty complete picture of what a college or university’s quality is like overall. That means their rankings are based on a board set of criteria, including, but not limited to:

SAT/ACT scores of admitted students
Graduation rates
Faculty quality
Financial resources
While these factors are all certainly worthy of note, they are not necessarily the things that will determine if a school is the right fit for any given student. Perhaps most notably, these rankings don't make it easy to tease out which factors are most important to you.

In an attempt to address this issue, U.S. News and World Report also has many sub-lists of rankings, including regional schools, public universities, liberal arts colleges, and more. While this may help you narrow your focus a bit, be aware that these numbers don't tell the whole story about programs on offer, teaching philosophy, and so much more that makes up the character of an institution.

Best For What? Example of U.S. News sub-lists (Dartmouth, 2019)

There are also other ways to rank schools using totally different criteria.

Rankings Based on Return on Investment (ROI)

In Feb 2020, I attended an international higher education conference that was packed with admissions deans, VPs, and enrollment managers from a wide range of colleges. At lunch one day, I sat next to a representative from the University of Arizona. I asked him, “If it were you, how would you decide on a college?”

He said that he would definitely think about ROI — return on investment — and how good the career and internship offices were.

Georgetown University’s Centers on Education and the Workforce has created its own rankings based on ROI – namely, how much money graduates make on average, both immediately after graduating as well as five, 10, 20, 30, and 40 years down the line. Their report, Ranking 4,500 Colleges by ROI, finds that on average bachelor’s degrees from private colleges have a higher ROI than degrees from public colleges 40 years after enrollment. Community colleges and many certificate programs have the highest returns in the short term, though returns from bachelor’s degrees eventually overtake those of most two-year credentials.

Of course, there are issues with this type of ranking as well. For starters, there's a bias towards specialty pre-professional schools. For example, the top three four-year bachelor's programs in the Georgetown rankings are all pharmacology schools. That's great for future pharmacists, but not terribly useful for everyone else.

Still, ROI is a factor to consider if optimizing earning potential and having the income to pay off student loans after graduation is a major consideration for your family.

Rankings Based on Institutional Financial Health

Many institutions of higher education were struggling financially before the COVID-19 pandemic. With the huge shifts in enrollment that lockdowns have caused — not to mention shutting down other money-makers like Division I sports — many colleges will have trouble staying afloat. Now, more than ever, data and rankings about institutional financial health could be an important factor in your decision as you look for a college that will be able to stay in business for at least the next four years — and ideally much longer!

Forbes ranked hundreds of colleges based on a variety of criteria, beginning with a college’s Carnegie Classification “a higher education framework that categorizes schools by their degree offerings, research output and specialty focus.” Criteria include endowment size, liquidity, tuition, expenses and more. Note that the list is not comprehensive, as it's much harder to gauge the finances of public institutions whose funding can vary based on both economic and political changes.

Rankings Based On A “Holistic” View

You may not be familiar with the college search platform Niche, but Niche rankings incorporate many more factors (54) into its rankings than U.S. News, Forbes, et. al. including survey responses from students and alumni, data about finances, diversity, whether the school is a “party” school, and how “nice” the campus is, among others. While this ranking system may provide, perhaps, a more “holistic” picture of an institution, the downside is that the ranking will be affected by a whole host of factors that you may not care about at all.

How to Use College Rankings the Right Way

With any of these rankings, there's one crucial thing to remember: Small differences in ranking are meaningless, but differences of 20 or 50 steps can indicate some valid distinctions. It's a waste of time to focus on the minute differences between schools ranked 1, 2, and 3 — they're all excellent! Instead, take a look at the differences between schools ranked 3, 22, 50, and 100.

You want to start by getting a feel for the range of schools it makes sense to apply to. If you don’t have the “numbers” (GPA and test scores) to apply to an Ivy League or other highly selective school, then don’t waste time looking at the tiny differences among those in the top 10! Find your target range and go from there with your research.

If you're not sure how competitive your personal "numbers" are, your school guidance counselor can be a good guide for getting a sense of what range of schools to apply to. They've worked through thousands of applications and know the lay of the admissions landscape. Some guidance counselors can be quite conservative, though, and will advise you not to try for more prestigious schools. If you want to put in the hard work to reach for a better school, go for it! It’s okay to take some risks as long as you’ve got a solid backup plan.

It's also important to know what kind of school you want to attend. There’s a reason that the U.S. News and World Report breaks rankings into two main lists: national universities and national liberal arts colleges. Universities are generally larger and feature two separate communities: undergraduates and graduate students. Universities typically also provide more research opportunities and have more resources like larger labs and expansive libraries. Liberal arts colleges, on the other hand, are generally smaller and without graduate students. This means they can give their full attention to teaching with more intimate classes.

The bottom line? It’s all a matter of finding the right fit.

Dig Deeper Into Institutional Culture

Even rankings that split universities and colleges into separate lists might not go far enough into the details you need to make an informed decision. One problem is a tendency toward apples-to-oranges comparisons. For example, can you really compare liberal arts schools with conservatory programs to those that don’t have them? Or compare the iconoclastic "Great Books" academic structure of St. John’s College to more mainstream liberal arts schools? What about the unique status of Cornell University, which combines features of a land-grant university and a private college? There are plenty of institutions that do not fit easily into any broad-based ranking system and underscore the drawbacks inherent in any one-size-fits-all ranking system.

It’s also important to know the quirks of each college, regardless of its placement in the rankings. For instance, my alma mater is the University of Chicago, a school I loved attending and which provided me with some excellent research experience. But if you're interested in engineering, I’d say to stay away, despite UChicago's high ranking on the U.S. News list.

Why? Well, UChicago has no engineering department to speak of. It’s just not something they do there. It’s important to do some introspection and figure out what you want to study or what you want your college experience to be like. And if you don't yet know what you want to do, look at schools that offer plenty of options in terms of programs and potential career paths — and that are flexible in allowing transfers among majors. You won't find this information represented in most college rankings, so you must do additional research.

Companies always try to portray their ranking methodologies as scientific, objective, and solely numerical. While this may be true for rankings that are based on a single factor, most take into account many factors. This leads to significant subjectivity: What factors are chosen for the rankings, and how are those factors weighted?

These are both judgment calls, not universal truths. Certain factors are necessarily deemed more important by the companies making the rankings, but these factors may not matter at all to you. For instance, the social life at some major Midwestern and Southern universities places a premium on Division I sports. Their popularity may lead to an unusually high score for the school on “excellent social life” and consequently boost the school in the rankings. But if you have no interest in cheering for the home team, such a school may not be a good fit in spite of its ranking.

Rankings may have a sheen of objectivity to them because they're tied to numbers, but it’s well worth looking into how a particular ranking is put together and the relative weights given to its factors to help you understand what you're really getting.

How Colleges Game the Rankings System

College admissions professionals know that people look at rankings for guidance, so they have taken to “rankings management” — that is, artificially inflating certain factors that will move them up in the rankings. For instance, many colleges want to report a low acceptance rate so they can be ranked among the rarified “most selective” schools. Officials have said to themselves, “Hey, why don’t we advertise more to get more students to apply, and then maintain or lower the number of students we accept?”

Lo and behold, as the number of applications increased, those schools ended up with lower acceptance rates, and thus a higher ranking — not because anything about the education there had changed, but because of how their admissions process was tweaked to game the system. As a result, acceptance rate can no longer be considered a factor that unequivocally indicates selectiveness.

Northeastern University Played The Rankings Game & Won

Rankings Have Their Place, But Use Them Wisely

The rankings companies are in some ways victims of their own success: Their widespread popularity has, paradoxically, led to them becoming less useful over the years.

In short, rankings should never be the sole or even primary factor in deciding what schools to apply to — and you should take them with a huge grain of salt. Rankings are most useful in narrowing down the range of schools you're considering, but at the end of the day, personal preferences about school size, region, majors, and educational philosophy are far more important. So consider college rankings as just one of many tools at your disposal — and a subjective one at that.

Spencer Pevsner is pursuing a PhD in paleontology at the University of Oxford’s Benson Lab as part of the Environmental Research department. Spencer earned dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Biological and Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and a Master of Science degree in Paleobiology from University of Bristol (England).

Additional Resources: Updated for 2024

New York Times, Build Your Own Rankings Tool. And you can read about how the TImes’ Opinion Writers built this tool “How Build Your Own Rankings Was Built” and columnist Frank Bruni’s take on rankings and how one might go about building their own list: “There’s Only One College Rankings List That Matters,” March 2023.

Money Magazines Best Colleges and an article on their system and “Why There Is No Single ‘Best College’ in Money’s Brand New Rating System,” June 2023

Forbes’ College Rankings 2023.

Comparing The Major College Ranking Systems: Methodology Matters, Forbes, September, 2020.

U.S. News Changed The Way It Ranks Colleges. It’s Still Ridiculous, The Washington Post, September 2018.

Deciding Where To Apply: College Rankings 101