Harvard Medical School is the latest institution to opt out of U.S. News rankings
U.S. News & World Report started ranking colleges in 1983 and is now well-known for its many annual lists. It ranks high schools, law schools, business schools, you name it.
But since November, more than two dozen law schools — many of them highly ranked — have announced they would no longer submit data to U.S. News, saying the rankings were profoundly flawed.
This week, Harvard Medical School said it was withdrawing from the med school rankings. The dean wrote in an open letter that, essentially, education is too complicated a product to be ranked numerically. But a lot of applicants still pay attention to that numerical list.
What’s happened in the past two months could change the role rankings play in the process of applying to schools.
“The credibility of U.S. News — certainly their law school rankings — has been badly shaken,” said Colin Diver, who wrote the book “Breaking Ranks.”
He’s also led Reed College in Oregon and the University of Pennsylvania law school. He expects to see more medical schools withdraw from the rankings, maybe undergraduate colleges too.
That would be a big shift because, right now, “the first thing you do is you look at rankings,” Diver said. “It’s going to take a long time to break that culture.”
Part of the challenge is people feel good about paying for a highly ranked college education. Kind of the same as when they buy a highly ranked dishwasher.
“It makes us feel better as a consumer and ‘smarter,'” said Patrick Lorenzo, a counselor at St. Ignatius College Prep, a high school in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, schools — especially those that aren’t household names — have a lot to lose by not submitting data and potentially falling in the rankings, per Angel Pérez, who leads the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
“Colleges and universities are afraid that families may not consider them if they are not on the list,” he said.
U.S. News said it’s going to continue to rank schools whether they submit data or not.
“There is sufficient public data for us to continue to do the rankings and provide the service and the journalism that we know is important for the students,” said Eric Gertler, the company’s executive chairman and CEO.
Gertler won’t say how much money U.S. News makes from its rankings business. But some applicants aren’t looking at them at all and focus instead on what the graduates of particular schools have achieved.
Timothy Fields is a co-author of “The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions.” He points to role models like Martin Luther King Jr., who went to Morehouse College in Atlanta.
“You know, Morehouse is a great institution. I went to Morehouse. But it’s not in these rankings in the way these other institutions are,” he said. “And so what does success look like? And success happens at any number of institutions.”
Fields added that rankings can’t capture what it’ll really be like for a student to be on campus or what comes after graduation.