However, a university’s ranking will vary by source.
U.S. News & World Report ranks IU-Bloomington as tied with eight other schools for No. 76 out of 201 national universities. Forbes ranks the University as No. 107 out of the top 650 colleges in the nation.
Each ranking uses different methodologies. U.S. News & World Report uses undergraduate academic reputation, retention, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate and alumni giving as its core statistics for its rankings.
Forbes focuses on student satisfaction, post-graduate success, graduation rate and academic success.
Caroline Howard wrote in Forbes that the essential difference is between ranking based on how students are getting into college and ranking based on what students are getting out of college.
With so many discrepancies in the way colleges are ranked by different sources, the multiple factors of what makes a good school can’t be measured by statistics, IU Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives M. A. Venkataramanan said.
“Comparing rankings is often like comparing mangoes and avocados,” she said.
Despite this, IU does keep track of rankings from multiple sources. But Venkataramanan said the reason is to be aware of what parents and students see rather than to measure itself.
“We watch it, but we are a lot more interested in our internal metrics,” Venkataramanan said. “If we improve our internal metrics, our ranking will go up, and if it doesn’t, we know there are anomalies in the system.”
Before the 2015-16 academic year, the U.S. government intends to release a new standardized college rating system. This system will be used to decide the amount of aid a college receives from the federal government.
Dr. Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, said there is a distinction between the ratings being created by the government and the numerous rankings created by private companies.
While “rankings” assign a number to colleges, the federal “ratings” will group colleges into tiers. This difference makes it almost impossible to compare the two methods, Kelchen said.
In 1911, the U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned the first federal rating system that included about half of the colleges in the country at the time.
Attention was drawn to this rating system when Kelchen tweeted a link to the ratings.
He said he discovered the 1911 ratings four years ago in graduate school while he was doing research for a class on the history of higher education.
The 1911 system divided colleges into tiers, much like the upcoming federal ratings will, but the ratings in 1911 were based on how prepared graduating students were for graduate school.
IU was placed into the first class of colleges alongside schools like Harvard University and the University of Chicago, which often top today’s college rankings.
Venkataramanan said he believes IU will still be rated among the elite in the upcoming federal ratings.
“I think we might be better now than we were then,” he said.
