As U.S. News & World Report has faced boycotts and criticisms of its college rankings over the past several months, other rankings editors have been watching. Now, one ranker, Money magazine, is announcing a major change. Colleges on Money’s 2023 list will get a rating — somewhere between two-and-a-half and five stars — instead of a numbered rank.
Stories about the rankings on Money.com encourage students not to obsess over small differences in ranks, and to use the Money list as one tool among many in making their college choice. (U.S. News offers similar advice.) But Kaitlin Mulhere, Money’s higher-education editor, said all the caveats felt a bit disingenuous. “We know how long people spend on the website,” she said. Largely, readers were scrolling through the list, not getting a nuanced understanding of how rankings work.
So, Mulhere said, “We’re hoping that the ratings can be in the middle, where they can give some idea of a college’s quality and value, but not make it so easy to get distracted by where a college places among peer colleges or, you know, where your work friend went to school.”
Some rankings critics have long suggested ratings or “bands” as a better way of comparing colleges. The idea is that the way rankings are calculated, negligible differences can nonetheless translate into different ranks, even as it’s a college’s rough place on a list that tells you something about it, not its exact ranking. Mulhere said she first proposed a rating instead of a ranking to her bosses in early 2022. At that time, they discussed the idea but didn’t adopt it. Then they saw what happened with U.S. News, starting in late 2022.
“When we weighed the pros and cons,” Mulhere said, “one of the pros was: Let’s look at the cultural and social conversation that’s happening right now around rankings, and should we be changing the way that we approach ours because of it?”
Ratings, rather than ordinal rankings, “make way more sense,” said Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy for FairTest and a longtime rankings critic.
Money first ranked colleges in 1990. In 2014, the methodology got a major refresh, incorporating information on graduates’s earnings. The focus on graduates’ outcomes, rather than institutions’ prestige, was an innovation for the time. Jeffrey J. Selingo, a higher-education journalist and former editor of The Chronicle, wrote in 2015 that, “of all the rankings out there,” Money’s effort “comes the closest” to answering what return on investment colleges offer students.
Money’s ranking formula has always been designed to reward outcomes and affordability, not selectivity and reputation, Mulhere said. Bello didn’t think that was strictly true. The methodology does consider the standardized test scores of incoming freshmen, weighted at 5 percent, which is arguably a selectivity measure.
Nevertheless, outside experts said the Money formula appears to try to capture qualities and outcomes that matter the most to low- and middle-income students and families, like graduation rates, adjusted for institution type, and employment. That’s in contrast to U.S. News, the industry’s 800-pound gorilla and the most prominent college ranking in the U.S. In its 2022-23 formula, U.S. News weights heavily selectivity, faculty resources, and the results of a reputational survey. Experts also pointed out that Money’s ratings may be more difficult to game. Their inputs are either not reported by the colleges themselves, or are reported by colleges to the federal government, which might deter them from submitting sloppy or falsified numbers.
But some experts criticized how poorly historically Black colleges and universities tend to fare on the list, despite the methodology attempting to adjust for those colleges’ public-service missions and concomitant lower graduation rates. The reason for HBCUs’ low Money ratings is that despite their competitive pricing, many have higher borrowing and lower loan-repayment rates, which is a reflection of the fact that their students often come from less wealthy families. “We know what societal issues contribute to all of those, but we just haven’t found a way to control for them better in our ratings,” Mulhere said.
Money doesn’t rate colleges that have lower graduation rates than the median for their institution type — public, private, or HBCU. Elizabeth D. Pisacreta, who specializes in access to college for low-income students at Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit consultancy, thought it could help to list even the lower-graduation-rate institutions. Students could have many “good reasons” for choosing a college with a low graduation rate, such as its location, or the availability of child care. Seeing the data points that Money posts for its colleges, such as the average net price, could help those students. This isn’t the first time Mulhere has heard that it would help to include more colleges’ data in Money’s list, but the problem is a lack of people and resources to publish more college profiles, she said. Low grad rates, the most common reason colleges are not listed, help keep the project manageable.
Is Money’s college list — with its focus on outcomes, and now its rating system — a net good for students and society? Mulhere said the magazine is trying to do its best given the financial realities of the media business. In a generation of sinking ad revenues, Money’s college lists are an important, although not the primary, source of revenue supporting Money’s journalism, Mulhere said. (The publication sells “We’re no. X in Money’s ranking!” badges that colleges can display on their websites. It also seeks sponsors for its lists.) “This makes us more money than a lot of our great journalism does, sadly,” Mulhere said. “So it is the reality of the world we live in.”
