This month, high school seniors across the country will choose where to spend the next four years of their lives. Many will turn to familiar, trusted tools to simplify this process. One such tool is that of college rankings, including the annual list authored by the national publication U.S. News & World Report. 

However, many institutions across the country have decided to boycott this list, claiming that it may not be so trustworthy after all.

“We think that information about colleges is useful, but ranking them is not,” said John Christensen, director of admissions at St. John’s College, located in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

St. John’s, along with Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and dozens of other schools throughout the nation, has been boycotting the U.S. News rankings “for many, many years” because, according to Christensen, of a strong belief that this and similar lists merely tell potential students how difficult it is to attain admission to an institution and not what kind of an education they will receive once enrolled.

According to the school’s website, Reed has not contributed statistics to the survey since 1995 and “questions the whole notion that a…student’s college experience can be boiled down to a set of numbers.” A student intern at Reed’s admissions office echoed this sentiment, saying that the college did not want to be “ranked and valued” when there exist many intangible factors that will contribute to one’s experiences at any institution.

“I think that [rankings] tend to oversimplify a choice that is enormously complicated,” provided Gregory Pyke, OC ’68 and senior associate dean of admissions at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Pyke insisted that students should take a genuine look at the colleges they are considering and try to find an “appropriate match of institution and individual” rather than placing blind faith in rankings borne of “miniscule differences” between two schools.

“[I]t’s like saying that one friend is better than another,” offered Jennifer Delahunty Britz, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. To even attempt such distinctions is thoroughly misleading because a school’s rank “does not necessarily evaluate the quality of a single student’s experience.”

Pyke provided one example of an important factor in the college process that does not enter into the normal rankings scheme: “Nowhere does U.S. News take into account the…diversity that makes schools like Oberlin and Wesleyan good places to learn.”

Also under scrutiny are the statistics that U.S. News uses to compile its list. About a quarter of the data that goes into rankings comes from reputation surveys taken by officials at various institutions, meaning that these values are solely the opinions of others. According to Britz, the vast majority of factors in this list are financial, and, of course, the amount of money an institution receives does not always reflect the quality of education it provides. 

Though several schools have taken steps to avoid involvement in the rankings process to various degrees, some are adamant that boycotting such lists is no way to solve the problem of arbitrary, irrelevant statistics substituting for valuable, firsthand insight. “I think we can change [this system] by…talking to people about the real differences between colleges,” said Pyke.

Britz agreed, blaming college administrations themselves for the dependence on hard numbers. She stressed that institutions of higher learning themselves should provide other criteria by which students desperate for help can judge prospective colleges. Pyke suggested that colleges use the rankings as a tool for self-evaluation, but both officials said that their institutions choose not to stress their own rankings for publicity’s sake.

Britz suggested the National Survey of Student Engagement, which seeks to evaluate student participation at various universities, as an alternative to tired lists of statistics. 

Ultimately, the decision of where to go to college should be a highly personal one, stressed Pyke. “The choice of college for me…made a difference in how I see the world. I made my choice without…rankings and I would hope that students today do the same with firsthand information.”