US News Rankings for Colleges Unacceptable

Ajit Vakharia

According to the U.S. News 100 Best Colleges in the Nation, Harvard University is number one and Princeton University is number, but how do these rankings work? What makes a university better than another when the education is essentially all the same? According to Robert J. Morse and Samuel Flanigan the ranking is set by two categories: “quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality and a nonpartisan view of what matters in education” by the reviews. US News then compare schools to the amount of majors offered and the amount of graduates per major. Then they send out a survey of fifteen academic indicators to each university. Each factor is then ranked and weighed and compared to all other universities and then rankings are given all the universities. Only the universities and US News know what exactly are asked in the survey, but is this process fair to all universities and is it a reliable process to ranking colleges. College rankings should be based on many factors which include quality of professors, quality of teaching, ratio of students to professors, and amount of students graduating that earn jobs after graduation or go on to reputable schools. Students should also be given surveys to see how they feel about the school at which they go to. A lot more about how good a school can be told from students who would have a more unbiased perspective of the school than administrators or professors that are given the surveys.