Diving Overview:
- Colorado College announced Monday that it will no longer participate in U.S. News & World Report’s college student rankings, becoming the second institution to drop them in recent weeks amid stock concerns.
- In a statement, officials said the rankings equate academic quality with institutional wealth and prestige, using a methodology that perversely incentivizes colleges to offer merit-based financial aid — which tends to target wealthy students — at the expense of merit-based aid. on needs.
- Colorado College President L. Song Richardson said in the statement the institution cannot “align its values with these metrics”. Eric Gertler, executive chairman and CEO of US News, said in an emailed statement that the publication provides students with valuable data in their college search and that the rankings should be one component of that decision.
Diving Statistics:
Colorado College’s withdrawal from the Best Colleges Student Rankings marks the second such rejection this month, following the Rhode Island School of Design. the lists said they do not correspond to its institutional values.
While colleges often tout their high rankings, many administrators behind closed doors will complain about their admissions dominance.
Officials have long questioned some of the factors used to create the rankings, such as the survey officials completed at peer institutions. The exodus of law and medical schools from the system since November has highlighted this discontent.
US News said it will continue to rank law schools using publicly available data, but she modified her formula he relied less on inter-institutional research in response to defection. Some law schools said the change would not prompt them to re-rank.
Richardson said Colorado College wants prospective students to choose a liberal arts education based on criteria not measured by rankings, such as critical and creative thinking and “comfort with failure and ambiguity.”
“Students who choose to enroll at Colorado College want to learn in a highly immersive curriculum; they want deep and authentic collaboration in small learning communities; and they want to participate in the learning process as partners,” Richardson said.
Based on recent survey results, Colorado College’s board of trustees, faculty, students and alumni supported the decision, the institution said.
The college will continue to share metrics online, including graduation and retention rates and graduate success. It is ranked 27th in the latest version of the list of the best liberal arts colleges in the US.
Few other institutions stopped submitting information to the undergraduate rankings during the decades they were prominent. In particular, Reed College in Oregon did so in the 1990s. Reed’s supporters say the publication punished the college by lowering its rating. US News has since moved Reed up the list.
