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The next time you hear somebody mention college rankings when calling one college better than another, kick them in the shins.

Well okay, don’t be that harsh, but you should stop taking them seriously right there.

Somehow, college rankings have become a significant way to judge universities, yet few realize how difficult it is for one small number to fully and accurately summarize a university. Many use college rankings as a way to quickly compare two schools, yet few actually realize just how faulty rankings are:

#1: College rankings lists differ a lot.

The most commonly-cited list of college rankings is from the US News & World Report. This publication holds the most weight and is referred to more than any other, but there are still other ranking lists out there. Forbes has a list as well, and the Institute of Higher Education ranks schools as well. Each publisher uses an entirely different method to rank schools and emphasizes different factors.

The end result? A school ranked highly on one list might be terrible on another. UC Berkeley, for example, ranks 3rd overall on the Institute of Higher Education’s list, yet a modest 73rd on Forbes‘s list. The US News & World Report places Berkeley in the middle, at 21st. The University of Michigan ranks 26th from the Report, yet only 161st from Forbes.

Even more interesting, these huge differences are on purpose. College rankings sell a lot (in fact, it’s the biggest thing the US News & World Report is known for), and different publishers are always trying to get into the market. Creating a completely unique list sells a lot more copies than a list that’s essentially already there.

So if rankings vary so much (and intentionally), then how do you determine which one is true and which ones are false? Two lists obviously can’t be right at the same time, so if you’re going to give college rankings any authority, you have to decide which one you’re going to stand by.

#2: College rankings are based on inaccurate data.

Top college lists are not reliable.

However, even if you can stick to one ranking list, that doesn’t mean that list is flawless.

Because so many people care about college rankings now, colleges have taking an interest in ranking well: a good ranking reflects well on the school and can attract quality students. However, the same colleges that want to rank well also supply the data for ranking lists, and fudging the data is not unheard of. Universities will also attempt to cater towards the rankings in other ways:

• Selectivity. Colleges will send out fliers and pamphlets to encourage more students to apply. Although more students apply, the college only accepts the same amount, causing the percent of students admitted to decrease, making the college look more selective, even though the caliber of the average student has not changed.
• Inaccurate SAT scores. When reporting standardized testing scores, many schools will leave out the lower-than-average scores of “special case” students, such as athletes.
• Alumni donations. How many alumni donate to a school is taken into account into rankings. Some universities will stretch a donation out for multiple years in order to claim it longer than they should.
• Peer-review: The peer-review process asks university employees to rank other schools. With so many schools out there, many reviewers can’t possibly know enough about every school to rate them fairly and accurately, and who’s to say these reviewers are completely unbiased?

#3: College rankings are based on factors you don’t care about.

Ranking lists take into account a large variety of factors, and you’re not going to care about all of them. Many of them are not going to directly affect your experience in college in any way. Do you really care what percent of alumni donate to the school? Do you care what the average professor’s salary is? Do you care a lot about exactly how much research comes out of the school? A lot of the factors do not indicate the quality of your undergraduate education.

What you care about are class sizes, quality of professors, quality of the facilities, and the amount of opportunities available to you through the school.

Even the factors you do care about in rankings are going to be of a different importance to you depending on your tastes. If you want a prestigious school, you’ll care more about how selective a school is. If you’re going to attend a large university, many of the faculty/student statistics are going to be much different than a small liberal arts college.

College rankings also leave out a lot of important aspects of a school, such as the culture of a school. There’s no way to put a number on that, yet it’s definitely a huge part of what makes up a college.

Should I care about college rankings at all?

Not really.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them to help decide which college to attend. Just because the overall ranking isn’t accurate doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use the data that created them. Rankings take into account things such as class size, how many freshman return, and how many students graduate. These things are important, though a quick glance down the rankings list will give you none of them. If you’re considering two schools, find out the reasons why one is ranked above another instead of focusing on the ranking itself.

Even though they’re far from perfect, the problem with college rankings is not how they’re made, but how important people think they are. As a “just-for-fun” list, college rankings are as harmless as a sportscaster’s list of the top 5 football teams, but when people start to give them too much weight, college rankings become far too important when students decide what school to attend.

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