The latest celebrations of college rankings results arrived in journalists’ inboxes like a deluge.
Every institution seemed to have something positive to share in a string of self-congratulatory press releases touting their success in this year’s annual U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, released last week. Even some colleges that plunged in the latest rankings bragged about their outcomes. And while picking and choosing selling points is a time-honored marketing strategy, the approach draws added scrutiny at a time when public trust in higher ed is already at a low.
To take one example of rankings spin, New College of Florida has plunged 74 spots in the U.S. News rankings since Governor Ron DeSantis began a conservative overhaul of the institution in 2023. Before the takeover, NCF ranked 76th among national liberal arts colleges; this year it came in at 150th.
But despite falling 15 spots since last year, New College touted improvement across several metrics this year: financial resources per student, academic profile of the incoming class and full-time faculty. The news release—which included its performance in other rankings schemes where it improved—did not mention the overall U.S. News ranking or how the institution performed compared to prior years.
“Last year I said we were determined to earn top rankings across multiple national publications,” New College President Richard Corcoran said in the release. “These metrics prove the positive outcomes New College is creating. It also comes at a moment when families are asking a fair question about whether a degree is still worth the investment. Our answer is that the content of the four years matters. A student who writes a thesis, who is known by name by full-time faculty, and who has taken responsibility for their own education under an academic contract is not interchangeable with their transcript. Three independent rankings now say we are building that.”
But some New College alumni aren’t buying it.
William Rosenberg, president of Novo Collegian Alliance, an alumni group that has pushed back on the conservative overhaul, accused Corcoran of “cherry-picking” the rankings outcomes.
“For the million-dollar compensation package Corcoran is receiving, Florida’s taxpayers are entitled to honesty, not window dressing,” Rosenberg said in a news release last week.
Asked about the criticism and NCF’s fall in the U.S. News rankings since 2023, college spokesperson James Miller emailed Inside Higher Ed a statement that echoed last week’s news release and highlighted the same metrics. Miller also pointed to the negative impact of peer assessment, which U.S. News gathers and incorporates into its rankings methodology. Peer-assessment scores—long a topic of debate—make up 20 percent of the rankings.
“U.S. News is the only one of these rankings that incorporates subjective peer assessment into its methodology, and many Florida and Southeastern institutions ranked lower this year as a result,” he wrote. “By every objective measure, New College is getting stronger and better.”
New College isn’t the only Florida institution celebrating after a rankings decline. The State University System of Florida released a statement last week trumpeting its “upward trajectory,” even though most of its 12 member institutions fell in this year’s U.S. News rankings. Like New College, the state system pointed to its performance across multiple national rankings, a break from last year, when it issued a news release that only focused on U.S. News outcomes.
System officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
Outside Florida, other colleges highlighted rankings wins despite an overall drop. The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley fell by 37 spots year over year, from 213 to 250 in the national universities category. But officials made no mention of the drop in a subsequent news release, which focused instead on gains in the social mobility ranking and for several programs.
UTRGV did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
‘A Double-Edged Sword’
Though colleges are quick to celebrate their successes, private conversations are more nuanced. Some campus leaders loathe the rankings—but their institutions still tout their outcomes.
Teresa Valerio Parrot, principal of TVP Communications, said that she frequently has conversations with college presidents about how college rankings “are a double-edged sword.”
They can serve as both a marketing opportunity and a diagnostic tool.
“Sometimes they tell you what you want to hear, and other times they’re an interesting mirror of where you maybe need to spend more time or effort or potentially money,” she said. “And there is this duality that on campus the faculty often rue the rankings, and board members bring them up and want to either celebrate or to fix what they don’t think the institution got right that year.”
While U.S. News remains the most visible ranking, Parrot noted there are plenty of competing products to choose from if administrators want to emphasize a stronger showing elsewhere.
“You have so many different rankings that if you want to find a ranking that best reflects who you think your institution is and what you value, you are guaranteed to be able to find one,” she said.
It makes sense for colleges to emphasize outcomes that best align with their mission and strengths, so long as the framing offers an accurate picture of their performance, she added. But they drift toward spin “when you purport the rankings to show something that they don’t.”
Despite criticism over their methodology and questions about how accurately they measure institutional quality, U.S. News and other rankings schemes have staying power because they matter to consumers, which gives colleges an incentive to highlight them.
Nicholas Bowman, a professor of higher education and student affairs at the University of Iowa who studies college rankings, said U.S. News remains the dominant undergraduate ranking in part because it was an early market entrant, first launching in 1983. “They matter to folks who are making meaningful decisions about where to go, as opposed to whether to go,” Bowman said, adding that such rankings tend to matter most when students are choosing between selective institutions.
Though he believes consumers should approach rankings with “a healthy degree of skepticism,” Bowman’s research suggests U.S. News rankings have become more influential, especially for international students. Domestic students also consider rankings, but his research indicates that matters more for those in the national liberal arts colleges category than national universities.
In the end, experts note that rankings—as well as the selective framing of their outcomes—are both here to stay.
