The fact of the matter is that the answer to this question depends on the service that is providing the rankings. Some rankings may feature sponsored schools, while others may be unbiased. However, even an unbiased ranking of colleges may not take into consideration things that you would view as important.
Here are a couple of examples using popular college rankings you have likely heard of:
- S. News – Possibly the most popular college rankings list comes from U.S. News, and they just updated their ranking factors for 2022-2023. The number one factor for ranking schools is graduation and retention rates. What does this mean? A whopping 17.6% of a school’s ranking comes from the percentage of students who earn a bachelor’s degree in six or fewer years of school. Another 4.4% is based on the number of newly enrolled students who are still with the school the following fall. That’s a pretty heavy weight for something you may not consider as important as things like graduate indebtedness (which makes up just 5% of the score).
- Forbes – Another popular college ranking list is released by Forbes. This list places the most emphasis on success after graduation and student satisfaction (more than half of the ranking score comes from those categories). However, only 7.5% of the score is related to graduation rates.
As you can see, you need to determine what is most important to you and what goes into college rankings before they can provide you with any meaningful data.
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