Stop Chasing Rankings. Change What Matters.
Try This at Your Next Cocktail Party
The next time you want to have fun at a cocktail party with some of your friends—or maybe at a meeting of your institution’s board of trustees—I invite you to play a game with them.
It’s in two parts. Start by asking this:
In the past five years, how many national universities—you know, household names like Princeton, Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame, Michigan—have been ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News?
The answer?
57.
And it’s only that many because U.S. News loves a good tie. Each year’s “Top 50” is really more of a “Top 52-ish,” thanks to clusters of colleges bunched together by a hairsbreadth of decimal points, which rather defeats the premise of precision this enterprise pretends to offer.
From 2022 through the 2026 rankings, those 57 colleges have shuffled an average of less than a single spot per year. They’re basically playing musical chairs with each other, politely swapping seats.
The story repeats itself among the national liberal arts colleges group—places like Williams, Wellesley, Carleton, and the U.S. Naval Academy. During that same five-year span, 59 liberal arts colleges have appeared in the top 50.
Furthermore, 41 of the top 50 national universities and 39 of the top 50 national liberal arts colleges have appeared in their respective top 50s in every edition between 2022 and 2026.
All that to say, there’s little change in average position at the top of the rankings.
And yet, every year we know that college administrations will make bold plans to move into the Top 50. These are colleges that are sometimes 15 or 20 (or more) places below that magic threshold, which means they must leap over a host of other colleges, many of whom are also vying for a spot in that exclusive club.
Inside the Velvet Rope
This is where the second part of the game comes in. Ask this question:
If you’re a college standing outside the velvet rope, trying to get into the Top 50 Club, which of the following will be the best way for you to move up in line?
- Lower your acceptance rate.
- Lower your discount rate.
- Send your alumni magazine to the presidents of all the colleges in the top 50 so they will look favorably upon you and invite you into the club.
It’s a trick question: none of them work.
Admissions selectivity is no longer a factor in the U.S. News ranking formula. And discount rate—despite being a hobbyhorse for many higher ed enthusiasts—has never been a factor.
Quite a few colleges try option three with significant enthusiasm (and investment), touting their successes through campaigns designed to impress their peers with the hope of bumping up their Peer Assessment Score.
The Cool Kids Table Conundrum
If you’re not familiar with the Peer Assessment Score, it’s derived from the opinions of three individuals at each school: the president, chief academic officer and the chief enrollment officer. Each receives a survey every year from U.S. News, asking them to rank the colleges in their respective category from 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding), with an option for “Don’t know.”
As if that weren’t problematic enough—peers assessing their competitors for coveted spaces under the guise of collegiality—the Peer Assessment Score accounts for 20 percent of a college’s rank, making it the single factor carrying the heaviest weight.
If you’ve ever been in a high school cafeteria, you can imagine how this might play out.
The kids at the “cool table” have been sitting there for decades, and they’re not scouting for new friends. We know from rom-coms—aside maybe from Patrick Dempsey’s Ron in Can’t Buy Me Love—that the odds of a less-popular kid charming their way into a seat at that table are nearly zero. And, much like “The Ronster,” in the unlikely event the invitation to the “cool table” arrives, the less-popular kid probably won’t last very long.
The Real Work
For far too long, colleges have viewed their rankings challenges (like their enrollment challenges) as marketing problems, often expressed with a familiar lament that starts with, “If only more people knew about us …”
The best marketers—like my RHB colleague, Rob Zinkan—know that the thorniest institutional challenges aren’t promotional problems; they’re product problems.
Changing how an institution talks about itself is relatively easy. Changing what an institution has to say about itself is significantly harder.
And that is where the real opportunity lies.
Focus on What Matters
When I was leading the enrollment division at Lawrence University, our president, Mark Burstein, exhorted our community stakeholders to “focus on the things that matter most and the rankings will take care of themselves.”
U.S. News has told us what really matters, and it’s not—despite its singular weight—the Peer Assessment Score. It’s the collective weight of factors aligned around retention and graduation rate:
- Graduation Rate: 16%
- Graduation Performance (predicted vs. actual): 10%
- Pell Graduation Rate: 5.5%
- Pell Graduation Performance: 5.5%
- First-year Retention: 5%
That’s 42 percent of a school’s ranking formula centered squarely on student success.
The most powerful lever of institutional improvement isn’t found in the admissions or marketing offices. It’s distributed across an institution in classrooms, advising offices, residence halls, and community spaces where students learn—day after day—whether they are known, whether they belong, and whether they can see themselves crossing the finish line.
Recruiting students is only a fraction of the game. Recruiting them—through our institutional behavior and expressions—to persist and graduate is the force multiplier.
That requires aligning strategy, staffing, systems, structure and spending around helping the students who said “yes” to us in the first place say “yes” again and again—on their way not only to surviving our institutions, but thriving in them.
At RHB, we use those five S’s as a framework to assess where an institution is, where it needs to go, and how to build—and follow—the path toward that destination. With a coherent strategy and broad institutional alignment, colleges can connect what they promise with what they deliver, feeding a virtuous cycle that takes care of the right things, and, in time, takes care of those rankings.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help.
