Why I Paid to Play with US News & World Report’s Online Rankings
Full disclosure: I never paid US News & World Report for a ranking. I think you will agree after reading the post, however, it accurately describes an exchange of money to use the US News & World Report’s badge, but not for the ranking itself.
Back when I worked full-time in higher ed marketing and strategy, I was responsible for adult online enrollment at two small institutions. Both had brick and mortar campuses in Vermont where the probability of running into a cow needing milking was far greater than finding an in-state adult resident who lacked a bachelor’s degree. Needless to say, we had to look beyond the Green Mountain state to find prospective students.
My job was tough. With little non-bovine population density in Vermont, Canada to the North (with lower tuition), New York to the West (with scores of well-known affordable options), New Hampshire to our East (need I even mention why it is so hard to penetrate the state home to SNHU?!), and the many storied institutions in Massachusetts (heck, you can even get an undergraduate degree from Harvard online) both schools were a tough sell.
Enter US News & World Report’s online rankings. It was our one chance each year to get our school on the map...for a sweet sum of course. For about $5,000 a year, we were able to purchase an entry-level badge for use in our digital campaigns, on our website, and in social media. That was assuming, of course, we achieved modest, middle-of-the-road rankings based on the trove of data our IR department submitted. Only once did we miss the mark. Being “best,” at least from the standpoint of the badge, meant being in the company of several hundred other institutions. It is “free” to participate in the survey, achieve the ranking, get a basic listing on the USNWR website, and describe the accolade in a press release. However, most schools, like mine, also paid a hefty sum to market the ranking and for badge use.
Why did I advocate participating in the survey and setting aside a chunk of change to buy a badge each year? Our small brand needed some proxy for trustworthiness. Sadly, touting our regional (NECHE) accreditation didn’t get us there. Neither did the number of doctorally prepared faculty, career-focused programs, small class sizes, experiential learning, faculty-practitioners, 7-week courses, lower tuition—you name it! Prospective students want assurance that a less well-known school is legitimitate and could be trusted (a so-called “good school”). For a small regional online school, a USNWR “best” is as good as it gets. A fee starting at around $5,000 and a week of amassing data and completing the online survey is a small price to pay for that.
It is no accident that the exodus from the USNWR law school and medical school rankings started among storied and Ivy League institutions. Schools with better brand recognition simply do not need the rankings as much as small, low-to-mid tier, regional schools do. I’ll be curious to watch the downstream impacts of the withdrawal from the professional school ratings. Will it stop, or will more schools exit as they are pinched for marketing dollars? What do you think?
