Jonathan Henry, vice chancellor at the University of Maine at Augusta, hopes an email will arrive this month. He’s also kind of afraid of it.
The message, if it comes, will tell him that US News & World Report has again ranked his university’s online programs among the nation’s best. The story suggests the email will also prompt the university to pay, through a licensing agent, thousands of dollars for the right to advertise its ranking in US News.
For more than a year, US News has been embroiled in another bitter dispute over the value of college rankings — this time with dozens of law and medical schools vowing not to provide data to the publisher, saying the rankings sometimes influence unjustifiably the priorities of the universities.
But school records and interviews show that colleges nonetheless feed the rankings industry, collectively pouring millions of dollars into it.
Many lower-profile colleges are trying to stem enrollment declines and deal with shrinking budgets. And any endorsement that can attract students, administrators say, is tempting.
Maine in Augusta spent $15,225 last year for the right to market US News “badges” — pretty stamps with the US News logo — to commemorate three awards: the 61st online college program for veterans, the 79th online business degree and 104th -ranked online degree.
Mr Henry, who oversees the school’s enrollment management and marketing, said there was too much risk of being outbid and outmarketed by rival schools that pay to flash their shiny badges.
“If we could just ignore them, wouldn’t that be great?” Mr. Henry told US News. “But you can’t ignore the Leviathan that he is.”
Colleges can’t ignore how families evaluate schools, either. “The Amazonification of how we judge the quality of a product,” he said, has permeated higher education as consumers and prospective students seek order from chaos.
Money flows from small and large schools.
The University of Nebraska at Kearney, which has about 6,000 students, bought a US News “digital marketing license” for $8,500 in September. The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college, moved in August to spend $50,000 for the right to use its rankings online, in print and on television, among other things. In 2022, the University of Alabama paid $32,525 to boost its rankings in programs like engineering and nursing.
Critics believe the payments, from schools of all sizes and wealth, enable and incentivize a ranking system they see as harmful.
“I still can’t believe that higher education collectively paid them to distort what we do in higher education,” said Heather Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School who helped lead the revolt between the law and medical schools. . The money “spent on this frivolous business,” he said, could have been used to “transform lives,” perhaps through financial aid or recruiting low-income students.
US News said its logo licensing business reflects its reputation. The rankings, U.S. News leaders said, help students and parents find clarity in a crowded, confusing college market and let quality schools more easily penetrate with prospects.
US News is privately held and says little about its finances, which are bolstered by revenue from other classifications — including hospitals, mutual funds, college savings accounts and diets. But Eric J. Gertler, the executive chairman of US News, acknowledged in an interview that the publisher draws millions from universities that want to share in the allure of US News credibility.
“This really came from the community wanting to be associated with our brand,” said Mr. Gertler, whose company began licensing digital brands in 2010, the same year it retired the print news magazine. According to US News, “significantly less than half” of its revenue tied to education rankings comes from license badges.
US News reports that its educational site attracts at least 100 million users annually, and a survey released in September by the Art & Science Group, a higher education consulting firm, found that 58 percent of high school seniors were “considering” ranking in some degree. Such data reinforced the belief of many college administrators that it would be dangerous to pretend that the ranking industry simply did not exist.
When Mr. Henry sits in his office a few miles from the Maine State House and surveys the New England college landscape, he sees many schools jockeying for students. And, like many of his colleagues around the country, he fears that prospective students will assume his school is of lower quality if he doesn’t promote its rankings with the flash of impressive badges.
At the same time, opportunities for schools to make the cut increase as publishers expand their reach (and potential profits) by creating new distinctions.
US News offers badges in more than 130 categories for graduate programs, including paleontology, petroleum engineering, and doctor of nursing practice in acute adult gerontology programs. There are at least 85 categories for undergraduate programs, including new degrees in economics and psychology.
In total, if every school bought every badge available — just from the traditional undergraduate rankings released in September — US News would sell more than 4,400.
Best Undergraduate Nursing Programs? About 400 schools could purchase a badge.
Mr. Gertler, who said the editors are developing new categories by considering whether they would attract sufficient interest, defended the size of the nursing category, which he suggested was partly a response to campus feedback.
“I know for sure,” she said, “that we ended up ranking higher because they wanted more nursing schools to pay attention.”
Although US News remains the industry leader, it is not the only ranking service looking at schools as potential customers. The Wall Street Journal and its partners, for example, sell kits to colleges with “ready-made graphics and artwork that support immediate use of the award in marketing and communications campaigns.” (The New York Times does not rank colleges, but the Times Company licenses some intellectual property for products such as bestsellers or notable books and favorites of its product recommendation site, Wirecutter.)
Todd Gottula, who leads marketing efforts at Nebraska-Kearney, estimated that he receives an invitation from a ranking supplier almost every week.
“Our university doesn’t take a lot of it very seriously,” he said. Although Mr. Gottula said it was difficult to track how the use of the US News logo affects a metric like enrollment, he said the university viewed the publisher as “the industry standard” and believed that using its logo enhanced credibility of the university.
He said, however, that the price tag gave him “heartburn.”
College rankings have come under fire in recent years after arguments over prioritization, publisher errors and incorrect data submissions by universities. Some of their harshest critics admire the business model, however.
“I understand why it makes money, but I think it has significant negative consequences,” said Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, who condemned the redesigned formula used by US News for its most recent undergraduate rankings, which dropped his school five places. at No. 18.
The chancellor said last month that although Vanderbilt had sometimes bought the rights to the US News marks in the past, he did not expect that to continue.
A number of other universities that have licensed US News material in recent years, including The Citadel and Alabama, declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries.
US News insisted that its algorithm does not consider whether the publisher has a business relationship with a school, and the contracts showed that US News tells schools that licensing marks “will not in any way, positively or negatively, affect rankings or assessments”. Yale Law, for example, has not licensed badges from US News, but has held a share of the top spot for decades. Even when Dean Gerken led a rankings boycott, the school remained No. 1.
But leaders at schools like Yale acknowledge they have less need to advertise a ranking than most institutions. Many colleges are much closer to the situation at the University of Maine at Augusta: eager for students, under pressure, seeking every advantage.
“I always feel like you’re squinting when you write that check, because you feel like you’re drinking from that Kool-Aid,” Mr. Henry said. “But every year, we said, ‘This is still important.’
And so he will hope, again, in email.
