Why Colleges Can’t Quit the U.S. News Rankings

Yale Law School started the exodus last November: Dozens of law and medical schools, many among America’s most elite, vowed not to cooperate with the U.S. News & World Report rankings juggernaut. The publisher’s priority-skewing formula was flawed, administrators complained, as was the notion that schools could be scored and sorted as if they were mattresses or microwaves. Critics of the rankings dared to hope that undergraduate programs at the same universities would defect, too. But despite generations of private grousing about U.S. News, most of those colleges conspicuously skipped the uprising. Yale, Harvard and dozens of other universities continued to submit data for U.S. News’s annual undergraduate rankings, the 2024 edition of which will be released on Monday.