Davidson Should Not Strive to Stay Atop College Rankings

AVEDIS

REID ‘26

In the last year, American colleges have waned further and further from objective rankings. Catalyzed by Columbia University’s removal from the U.S. News & World Report National University rankings after a math professor exposed misleading and inaccurate statistics submitted to the Report (and subsequent reinstatement sixteen places down the list), several prominent graduate institutions have removed themselves from the Report’s rankings and others like it, including Yale and Harvard Law Schools. Some undergraduate institutions seem poised to follow suit. In the potential absence of formal rankings, college admissions offices are no less competitive. An article on the front page of this paper asks how Davidson is to stay on top—I don’t think we need to. If undergraduate institutions are going to start withdrawing, we should be the first.

A junior, looking at the U.S. News rankings for the first time is probably unaware of what goes into ranking one college above another. They likely don’t care what percentage of an institution’s full-time faculty hold a doctorate or terminal degree. The average alumni giving rate likely won’t make a large impact on their college decision. I know I didn’t, but the U.S. News report was presented to my classmates and me as the holy grail of the college landscape. Students eat it up, partially because it comes with a big fancy logo and partially because the colleges themselves put so much stock into it. When Columbia moved to #2 from #3 (before their fall from grace), the admissions team celebrated, and broadcast their achievement on social media. Colleges strive to keep their admissions rate low and their yield rate high, sometimes waitlisting swaths of applicants on release day only to admit them a few days later. I don’t believe Davidson is any exception. But so much of the gravitas of college rankings comes from the colleges’ frenzied efforts to improve their station on them. The lists are often omnipresent in the minds of applicants, even subconsciously.

If a student is trying not to be influenced by rankings or prestige, it’s likely their friends care, and that awareness bores into that student’s mind. Those students see judge both colleges and themselves by the rankings, yet often aren’t even aware of how those lists are comprised. Prestige has become a beast seperate and apart from what built it.

If Davidson removed itself, I don’t think it would hurt application numbers—it would likely boost them. College admissions is sometimes a vapid and treacherous environment, increasingly in recent years, especially for sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen-year-olds. Freeing ourselves from the grasp of one of the central harbingers of the mental anguish that comes with the college process should be a welcome advancement, for admissions officers and applicants alike.

Avedis Reid ‘22 (he/him) is a Linguistics major from McLean, VA. He can be reached at avreid@davidson.edu