Summary (save some water and carbon output and use this instead of a Large Language Model)

In this post I tee up a case study involving college rankings. I use two articles to frame what rankings are and how I think about their significance. Rankings are a lucrative cottage industry that provides utility for college enrollment decision making, but also signals deeper assumptions about the value and purpose of higher education.

Intro

This is going to be part one of a two part post series on collegiate rankings. In this first post I’m going to share two artifacts that inform a lot of my personal thinking about rankings and then in part 2 I’m going to show you a new rankings tool that is being used for Christian colleges and universities.

An explanation of rankings

If you’ve ever gone through the experience of seeking admissions to a college or university I think it’s safe to assume you’ve encountered rankings as a part of the decision making process. Rankings generally fall into two categories: either they are facilitated through third party organizations such as magazines, or consulting firms; or public sector compiled metrics. One could compile a robust annotated bibliography on the phenomeon of rankings but to summarize some important points from the literature: in a society that relies on college degree attainment as a primary pathway to economic stability or social advancement selecting the right institution becomes a decision with life-path altering implications. Prestige and social advancement are factors for decision making–not just the economic value of the degree, and thats where rankings enter the picture. They consolidate a lot of information that purports to help prospective enrollees make economically sound decisions, but they also provide a shorthand for navigating the social status game that higher education matriculation involves. My intent is not to delve deeply into dynamics surrounding the cottage industry that constitutes college and university rankings, but I will highlight that it has become a lucrative tool for generating profit, and at a certain tipping point of social recognizability becomes a powerful tool for signaling (maybe shaping?) public perception about the utility of a college or university degree.^[1] At a prominent enough level of prestige or social capital rankings can guide postsecondary education policy.^[2] Literature has revealed that an important implication of rankings is for institutions that are highly ranked or those that buy into trying to win the status game rankings perpetuate.

Bowman and Bastedo (2009) highlight that an institution’s placement within rankings matters most for institutions that have already achieved high rankings, or choose to chase a higher ranking. In their study they find that placement in the top 25 in US News and World Report had a causal impact on future enrollment trends. However, for institutions not in the upper echelons of the top 25, particularly smaller private colleges, tuition and costs are a larger causal driver for enrollment than rankings. Colleges and universities can’t ignore rankings altogether but they become less important for driving enrollment for smaller, less academically prestigious, and obscure institutions.

The mechanics that inform the rankings process matter, because the data collection and reporting mechanisms signal deeper values about how to define quality or prestige. Jelena Brankovic has written an entertaining and informative blog post on this topic. She spotlights the phenomenon of “reputation surveys” and contextualizes them historically. It is fairly common when ranking specific academic programs, for example, U.S. News and World Report rankings of education programs, to use survey data from practitioners or other scholars in the program’s field of study to inform the rankings. Borrowing from William Arrowsmith, Brankovic calls this practice “quantified gossip.” Her post reinforces that this has been a long standing historical practice. It also reinforces that rankings aren’t just “objective” measures of institutional performance, they carry submerged assumptions about how one should define quality or prestige. The next time you come across a headline promoting an institution’s ranking or positioning, take a moment to consider what assumptions drive those rankings, and what it expresses about the utility or purpose of postsecondary education writ large

Okay, so that is all staging for some reflections I intend to post next week about a recently published tool for evaluating Christian colleges. We’ll use it as a case study for evaluating the deeper assumptions about the utility and purpose of higher education it may reveal.

*Editorial Note - post updated on 01.10.2025 to clarify that William Arrowsmith (not Jelena Brankovic) coined the term "quantified gossip."