Top 3 Reasons NOT to Trust Rankings

This week the US News and World Report rankings of colleges came out. Over the years, I have written extensively about this topic, in order to put them in perspective and point away from the list and more toward the methodology, i.e. how they are formulated.

When you draw hard lines and only visit or apply to schools in the Top X or Y from a list, or select a college simply because it’s ranked higher than another one to which you have been admitted, it gives way too much credit to the methodology on which these numbers are derived, and artificially distills countless qualitative factors and dynamics