For a party celebrating his retirement as the leader of America’s best-known college rankings, Robert Morse wore a white button-up shirt and black pants. Later, he sat for an interview in a gray chair against a white wall in a sparse office.
Previously, Morse had his own office, which was packed with his “life’s work,” said Kate O’Donnell, executive vice president for communications for U.S. News & World Report. That included a life-size cardboard cutout of himself. Now, U.S. News hot-desks — no one has a dedicated work space, and employees reserve a desk on the days they plan to come in person.
It’s not just anemic, post-pandemic office culture, however. Morse has long been known for his modest presentation. “His charm is his inscrutability,” Brian Kelly, an editor at U.S. News, told The Washington Post in 2014. “He speaks the language of data.” That blandness stands in stark contrast with the importance of Morse’s place in higher education.
Since 1988, Morse has helmed one of the sector’s most influential institutions. U.S. News & World Report’s rankings help prospective students decide where to go to college, figure in colleges’ strategic plans, inspired the federal government to post troves of higher-education data online, and even show up in some state laws. From the start, the enterprise drew intense criticism from college leaders, who said it was inaccurate, inexpert, and bad for underserved students.
Morse and his colleagues have defended their work by saying rankings give prospective students helpful information and are meant to be just one factor in their decision-making. Over the years, the two parties reached something of a détente. Morse met with college data crunchers annually at the Association for Institutional Research conference. He broke the news of his retirement this year at AIR, to (appreciative) applause, one attendee said.
On July 1, Morse will pass the baton to Eric Brooks and Kenneth Hines, who have worked on U.S. News’s education rankings for a decade or more. The change is happening at a pivotal moment for U.S. colleges. They have officially reached the “demographic cliff,” when the population of young-adult Americans is entering a period of decline. Activists within and outside of higher ed have been challenging the idea of “elite” colleges, with their traditional focus on selectivity and high ranking. And then there’s the second Trump administration, which has sought to shrink the Department of Education, on whose statistics Morse and his colleagues rely, and is trying to overhaul some of the country’s top-ranked colleges.
The Chronicle spoke with Morse an hour before his retirement lunch in mid-June. He reflected on how colleges, and the rankings, have changed over his career, and what they might look like in the future. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Congratulations, Bob.
It’s time for the next chapter of my life. I’ve been working at U.S. News for 49 and a half years.
Anyone exciting coming to the retirement party later today? [Stephanie Salmon, who has been at U.S. News for 20 years and is currently executive vice president for rankings and data strategy, had said that she had invited some of Morse’s former colleagues to the lunch, as a surprise.]
I’m actually not sure what’s planned. Do you know what’s planned? I’m just sort of rolling with the punches.
But I’ve worked with a lot of different people since I started at U.S. News. None of the original people I was working with are a part of it now.
If you had to pick, say, five people who contributed the most to the rankings over their history, who would you choose?
Certainly Mel Elfin, who’s passed away. I would say Al Sanoff, who’s also passed away.
[A long pause.]
Even though it’s not a person, U.S. News, as a company, played a big role in this, because U.S. News decided to go ahead and publish the rankings and take the heat from both the higher-education establishment and our other journalistic friends who didn’t always write positive things.
At the very beginning, it was very hard. “Who is U.S. News to rank us?” “You’re just a magazine. What do you know about higher ed?” “You’re damaging us.”
What are some of the biggest events in the history of U.S. News’s college rankings, since you started working on them?
In the late 1980s, incorporating statistical data and moving away from the reputation-only rankings. [The first U.S. News college ranking, published in 1983, was based entirely on a survey that asked college presidents to identify the country’s top institutions. Morse took over the project in 1988, when the magazine’s editors decided to add some data to the methodology. The current ranking formula weights the results of a reputational survey at 20 percent of a college’s final score.]
The fact that we started all these other rankings. We started doing the grad rankings in 1990. Then the high-school rankings, the global rankings. We’ve built a portfolio of educational rankings, K through eight.
We’ve evolved the methodology. We dropped high school class standing, acceptance rate. A few years ago, we dropped class size, alumni giving, and faculty with terminal degrees. We added Pell-grant graduation rates. We now include the proportion of grads that are earning more than high-school graduates.
At the beginning of the rankings, they were much more input-oriented and now, we’re emphasizing outcomes. We’ve changed the focus of the ranking.
This isn’t a methodology change, but we’ve tried to have an open-door policy, to engage higher education. That’s how we’ve actually gained knowledge about higher education.
When did you start trying to engage people in higher education?
Well, my engagement with AIR started in 1991. That’s when I went to the first AIR conference in San Francisco.
We have an admission-dean or enrollment-managers advisory group. That started around 1990. So it’s been a long time.
What motivated you to focus more on students’ outcomes after they attend a college, rather than attendees’ high-school class standing or colleges’ rejection rates? Were you hearing from users of the rankings or the higher-ed community, or was it something else?
All the above. When you meet with higher-ed people or admission deans or parents, they say the outcomes are the most important thing. It’s what the schools are doing after they enroll the students that says something about the school that’s more important than how hard it is to get in.
Some of the changes are related to the fact that the relevant data became available in IPEDS [the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System].
Why does reputation still weigh so heavily in the U.S. News formula?
Reputation does matter. We believe that it does play a role in helping students get into a graduate school, where you’ve gone to for your undergraduate program. It could open first doors to a job. Obviously, how your entire career goes, and if you’re going to succeed or not in a particular job, isn’t going to be based on having a name-brand diploma. It’s going to be based on how you perform. But it may help you get in the door the first time.
[Morse pointed me to an annual survey of incoming freshmen at colleges, in which 72 percent of respondents said that they chose their college because it “has a very good academic reputation.” More than 29,000 students’ responses are included in the survey results.]
These are giant numbers of incoming freshmen saying that reputation is important. They want to go to a school that they believe is a good school, and this is one way of saying whether a school is good or not.
Do prospective students and parents want something different from the rankings now than they did in the ’80s and ’90s?
That’s one thing I’m not necessarily an expert on. I know we get a lot of traffic. There’s a lot of people who come to our website and are using the rankings.
It’s obviously different than when it was a print guide. When the rankings became accessible by the internet, then that democratized them and they became far more impactful. It also opened up the global market. Leaving aside the current environment, there’s still a lot of international students who want to attend U.S. schools and they definitely care about the rankings, maybe sometimes more than the U.S. students care, since they’re paying the sticker price.
When you started with the rankings, colleges were looking at a period of growth in traditional college-aged students. After the ’80s, the demographic group of 18-to-24-year-olds would continue getting larger for another 20, 25 years. Now it’s getting smaller. Have you and your team thought about how you need to change the rankings to deal with the fact that it’s a different kind of student going to college these days?
We haven’t thought about your exact question. We haven’t really contemplated that.
Around 15 years ago, we started ranking online degree programs in some of the major fields. That’s how we’re covering that, right?
We’re aware of the things that you’ve just said, that the demographics are changing and people are questioning the value of a college degree and the cost of college is having an impact on students. We think what we’re offering still is helping students and their parents make a decision.
Any future developments in the rankings that you’re excited about?
No, I don’t really have any new developments that are on the tip of my tongue. This is what John F. Kennedy said, but it’s time for a new generation of rankers to take the rankings to the next level, or at least to evolve them, as I did.
