U.S. News & World Report College Rankings: Modeling Institutional Effects on Organizational Reputation

Abstract

Processes of certification and evaluation are some of the most powerful institutional forces in organizational fields, and in the higher education field, rankings are a primary factor in assessing organizational performance. This article explores the institutional effects of the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings on the reputational assessments made by senior administrators at peer universities and liberal arts colleges. In the estimation of structural equation models, we found that published college rankings have a significant impact on future peer assessments, independent of changes in organizational quality and performance and even of prior peer assessments of reputation. In 1983, when U.S. News & World Report published its first set of college rankings, Oberlin College ranked fifth among the nation's liberal arts colleges. This was hardly surprising as the ranking was based entirely upon reputation among its peers, and Oberlin had a long and storied history. It had a particularly strong reputation for placing students in top graduate programs, for decades ranking first among liberal arts colleges in the number of students who ultimately earned the doctorate (National Science Foundation 2006). Four years later, in 1987, Oberlin remained in the fifth position; the next year Oberlin was stunned to fall completely out of the top 10. Beginning in 1988, the U.S. News rankings methodology began to include quantitative measures of student and institutional characteristics that it believed were more objective measures of quality, and consequently peer reputation became a progressively smaller part of the overall ranking. Oberlin did not score at the top of these new measures, and its ranking suffered. By the mid-1990s, Oberlin was in

How Variances in Business School Rankings Affect Enrollment Trends and Practices

“…There have been many studies of undergraduate students and their responses to rankings (Bastedo & Bowman, 2010Bowman & Bastedo, 2009;Dearden, Grewal, & Lilien 2014;Espeland & Sauder, 2007). However, there have not been many studies that have dealt with graduate schools.…”

“…While the rankings published in U.S. News remain the most prominent, the increased number of rankings that have arisen (Business Week, Forbes, the Financial Times, the Economist, etc. ), continue to absorb market share from U.S. News (Bastedo & Bowman, 2010).…”

“…As Bastedo and Bowman (2010) have stated, one of the reasons why students have often embraced the U.S.…”

“…Thus, this method of decision-making becomes the simplest and best possible chance at research. Bastedo and Bowman (2010), believe that a different subset of students and parents are also likely to internalize the rankings presented to them without even exploring what they mean and make these their opinion. This gives this subgroup some hierarchy of the institutions that are considered best.…”

“…The research on rankings is best summarized by Bastedo and Bowman (2010), who noted that the majority of the research in the topic can be categorized in two major areas: making sense what type of effect rankings have on student behavior, especially as it pertains to college selection and choice, and understanding the impact rankings can have on organizational identity and change. Hazelkorn (2011) instead chose to differentiate the literature on rankings into methodological concerns: which deal with all the flaws and issues found in the rankings, and the theoretical understanding: which deals with the impact the rankings have on students and organizations.…”