USC students pass Tommy Trojan, an iconic statue of school pride. (Photo by Ling Luo)
USC earned a No. 25 ranking in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2022-23 college rankings, up two spots from last year’s ranking.
Each fall, U.S. News & World Report publishes its annual ranking of the best colleges in the United States, which evaluates schools on measures including graduation and retention rates, academic reputation and student-faculty ratio.
After collecting the data, U.S. News & World Report used a score out of 100 to determine the rankings. USC scored an 80 this year, a one point increase from last year.
Lauren Bartlett, the vice president of the Office of Strategic and Crisis Communications at USC, explained why USC’s ranking fluctuates differently from each year, according to a statement made to Annenberg Media.
“Many national and international magazines publish college rankings these days,” Bartlett said. “However, the way these rankings are calculated changes frequently; the formula, algorithms, ‘peers’ being polled, and even the data used by the different companies rarely are made public. Therefore, we don’t comment on them.”
College ratings are sometimes used by prospective students to evaluate institutions.
“It’s hard enough to get to 25 in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings,” said Gengzhu Peng, a graduate student studying analytics. “At least it’s not as low as the QS rankings,” Peng said, referring to a United Kingdom-based ranking of schools globally, in which USC most recently ranked 134.
Lakshmi Tharani, a sophomore from India studying biological science on an exchange program from Boston University, said she didn’t consult the rankings as a basis for her choice of schools.
“I’ve been living in Los Angeles for five years now, and before I came to the U.S., many people didn’t know the true level of American schools,” Tharani said. “The U.S. News rankings can help students who want to come to the U.S. to better understand the overall strength of a university. But after I came to the U.S., I think the rankings became less important.”
Researching colleges often plays an important role in many high school students’ application journeys. Rankings become handy when students weigh different perspectives of universities. However, some schools have found ways to benefit from the loopholes when reporting their numbers.
In September, Columbia University admitted to reporting faulty data, which was sent to the U.S. News magazine ahead of last year’s rankings. It rose in recent years, from No. 4 in fall 2010 to No. 2 in the 2022 published edition of the U.S. News rankings.
The USC Rossier School of Education disclosed in a note to all school applicants and incoming students in April that the “Rossier School had been reporting inaccurate research and student enrollment data to the U.S. News & World Report” for several years. Rossier ranked eighth in US News’ 2020 ranking of the nation’s best graduate education schools.
Alonzo Clark, a Los Angeles native and a junior majoring in economics, said he didn’t even know the U.S. News & World Report ranked schools. He said he chose to come to USC because it was close to his home.
In 2020, many high school students were unable to obtain standardized test scores when pandemic-related closures forced many universities to transition online. USC announced that standardized scores would no longer be a mandatory requirement in response to these changes. In February 2021, the Office of Admissions announced that the policy would be extended for two academic years.
With the end of the pandemic in sight and the reinstatement of the standardized score requirement coming up in the spring of 2023, some students like Peng think that a better ranking for USC is in the near future.”[P]erhaps we can expect a better result for USC in the U.S. News & World Report rankings,” he said.
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