Amid widespread questioning of the validity of college rankings last year, Money magazine tried something different — changing its 33-year-old ranking into a rating system. Gone was the one-through-600-something numbered list. Instead, colleges fell into just a handful of buckets: In Money’s latest sorting, out today, college ratings range from two to five stars, in half-star increments.
It was just the kind of thing that rankings critics have long said would be a more-helpful way of categorizing colleges than numerical lists. The thinking is that buckets convey that several colleges may be fairly similar, and that the difference between the No. 19 and the No. 20 college, say, may be arbitrary. But Americans love rankings. We love knowing who’s No. 1. So how would Money’s ratings fare in a world where other publications were happy to continue to put out rankings? How would rankings users feel about them?
Judging from website traffic, Money didn’t suffer for switching to ratings, according to numbers provided by the magazine. In the first month after Money published its first-ever ratings, the total number of unique online visitors to the main list of colleges, sublists, college-profile pages, and methodology page was actually 40 percent higher than for the same period in 2022, when the magazine was still doing a ranking. Over the first three months after publication, the 2023 ratings outperformed the 2022 ranking by 14 percent.
“We took a risk in terms of experimenting with the way our list looks and giving readers something that they’re a little unfamiliar with. And the fact that traffic didn’t plummet? That, to me, is a success,” said Kaitlin Mulhere, the editor who oversees Money’s “Best Colleges” list. “The fact that we could put together what we think is a more-honest and useful consumer tool and still have strong traffic is a best-case scenario.”
Some other factors, unrelated to the list-strategy change, could have contributed to the traffic boost, Mulhere said. For example, the 2022 rankings published in May, which may have been a little early for prospective students researching colleges. The 2023 ratings published in June. Still, Mulhere considered traffic to last year’s ratings to have enjoyed a “sizeable bump,” compared to the year before.
One part of Money’s college-list package did see a steep decline in internet interest. The story introducing last year’s list did significantly worse than the equivalent story introducing the 2022 rankings, drawing 75 percent less web traffic. The two stories’ headlines hint at what online readers might have found more enticing: “Why There Is No Single ‘Best College’ in Money’s Brand New Rating System” in 2023, versus “These Are the 25 Best Colleges in America” in 2022.
To turn all the statistics about a college into one number — “I think you lose something in that.”
Two school counselors who serve very different populations both said that, in principle, they appreciated the move to ratings over a ranking. “I love it,” said Richard Tench, a counselor at Saint Albans, a public high school in West Virginia where more than half of students are from low-income families and about half enroll in two- or four-year colleges immediately after graduating.
Colleges are complex institutions, and to turn all the statistics about a college into one number — “I think you lose something in that,” Tench said. He could think of a few ways he and his students could use a tiered list, including quickly identifying a number of colleges of comparable “quality,” which students could then contrast on specific characteristics that mattered to them, such as size or financial-aid package.
Eric Sherman, a counselor for IvyWise, a private college-admissions company that families may pay tens of thousands of dollars for many years of advising, thought buckets could help him “widen the scope of possibility for students and families.” When clients come to him feeling very attached to a small handful of highly ranked, super-selective colleges, he tries to tease out what qualities, “beyond brand and prestige,” attract them to those institutions. Then he suggests other colleges to help students maximize the chances that they’ll get in somewhere they’ll be happy. He compared himself to the Netflix algorithm: “I can give you five other schools that have the same qualities, characteristics, but that are at a different, more-forgiving range of selectivity.”
Sherman thought college ratings could help him and his colleagues make the argument to students and families that X, Y, and Z colleges can all give them what they want. They provide “fuel or ammunition that we can have to back up what we’re saying,” he said.
All that said, both Tench and Sherman said the students they’ve worked with don’t seem very aware of Money’s college list. The best-known and watched list remains U.S. News & World Report’s, which is an ordinal ranking. Even then, there are caveats: About 90 percent of Tench’s college-going students attend public institutions in West Virginia, taking advantage of generous state scholarships. In those cases, Tench knows enough about the colleges the students are choosing between to be able to advise them without having to turn to outside rankers like U.S. News or Money.
Among Sherman’s clients, there will always be some families that prefer a numbered list.
“Some families are just very status-driven,” he said. “They want to be able to say at cocktail parties, ‘My daughter goes to this school.’” Though, he’s found that more families are becoming more open-minded about rankings: With the increasing selectivity of the best-known colleges, families know they have to hedge their bets.
