U.S. News & World Report

U.S. News & World Report is an American media company that publishes news, opinion, consumer advice, rankings, and analysis. Founded as a news magazine in 1933, U.S. News transitioned to primarily web-based publishing in 2010, although it still publishes its rankings. U.S. News covers politics, education, health, money, careers, travel, technology, and cars.

U.S. News & World Report
Owner(s)U.S. News & World Report, L.P. (Mortimer Zuckerman)
EditorKimberly Castro
Launched1948 (1948) (merger of United States News [1933] and World Report [1946])
LanguageEnglish
Headquarters
CountryUnited States
Websiteusnews.com

The company's rankings of American colleges and universities are popular with the general public[1] and influence application patterns.[2]

History

United States News was founded in 1933 by David Lawrence (1888–1973), who also started World Report in 1946. The two magazines covered national and international news separately, but Lawrence merged them into U.S. News & World Report in 1948.[3] He subsequently sold the magazine to his employees. Historically, the magazine tended to be slightly more conservative than its two primary competitors, Time and Newsweek, and focused more on economic, health, and education stories. It also eschewed sports, entertainment, and celebrity news.[4] Important milestones in the early history of the magazine include the introduction of the "Washington Whispers" column in 1934 and the "News You Can Use" column in 1952.[5][6] In 1958, the weekly magazine's circulation passed one million and reached two million by 1973.[5]

Since 1983, it has been known primarily for its influential ranking and annual reports of colleges and graduate schools, spanning across most fields and subjects. U.S. News & World Report is America's oldest and best-known ranker of academic institutions,[7] and covers the fields of business, law, medicine, engineering, education, social sciences and public affairs, in addition to many other areas.[8] Its print edition was consistently included in national bestseller lists, augmented by online subscriptions. Additional rankings published by U.S. News & World Report include hospitals, medical specialties and automobiles.

In October 1984, publisher and real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman purchased U.S. News & World Report.[6] Zuckerman had owned the New York Daily News. In 1993, U.S. News & World Report entered the digital world by providing content to CompuServe and in 1995, the website usnews.com was launched. In 2001, the website won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence Online.[9] In 2007, U.S. News & World Report published its first list of the nation's best high schools. Its ranking methodology included state test scores and the success of poor and minority students on these exams, and schools' performance in Advanced Placement exams.

Starting in June 2008, the magazine reduced its publication frequency in three steps. In June 2008, citing a decline overall in magazine circulation and advertising, U.S. News & World Report announced that it would become a biweekly publication, starting January 2009.[10] It hoped advertisers would be attracted to the schedule, which allowed ads to stay on newsstands a week longer. However, five months later the magazine changed its frequency again, becoming monthly.[11] In August 2008, U.S. News expanded and revamped its online opinion section.[12] The new version of the opinion page included daily new op-ed content as well as the new Thomas Jefferson Street blog.[13] An internal memo was sent on November 5, 2010, to the staff of the magazine informing them that the "December issue will be our last print monthly sent to subscribers, whose remaining print and digital replica subscriptions will be filled by other publishers."[14] The memo went on to say that the publication would be moving to a primarily digital format but that it would continue to print special issues such as "the college and grad guides, as well as hospital and personal finance guides". Prior to ending physical publication, U.S. News was generally the third-ranked general American newsmagazine after Time and Newsweek.[15] A weekly digital magazine, U.S. News Weekly, introduced in January 2009,[16] continued to offer subscription content until it ceased at the end of April 2015.[17]

The company is owned by U.S. News & World Report, L.P., a privately held company based in the Daily News Building in New York City. The editorial staff is headquartered in Washington, D.C.[5] The company's move to the Web made it possible for U.S. News & World Report to expand its service journalism with the introduction of several consumer-facing rankings products. The company returned to profitability in 2013.[18] The editorial staff of U.S. News & World Report is based in Washington, D.C. and Brian Kelly has been the chief content officer since April 2007. The company is owned by media proprietor Mortimer Zuckerman.

Rankings

Who Runs America?

The first of the U.S. News & World Report's famous rankings was its "Who Runs America?" surveys. These ran in the spring of each year from 1974 to 1986. The magazine would have a cover typically featuring persons selected by the USN & WR as being the ten most powerful persons in the United States. Every single edition of the series listed the President of the United States as the most powerful person, but the #2 position included such persons as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1974),[19] Federal Reserve Chairmen Paul Volcker and Arthur Burns (each listed multiple years) and US Senator Edward Kennedy (1979).[20] While most of the top ten each year were officials in government, occasionally others were included, including TV anchormen Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, AFL-CIO leader George Meany, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. The only woman to make the top ten list was First Lady Rosalynn Carter in 1980.[21]

In addition to these overall top ten persons, the publication also included top persons in each of several fields, including Education, Business, Finance, Journalism, and many other areas. The survey was discontinued after 1986.

Best colleges
Main article: U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking
The top 10 national universities (red ) and liberal arts colleges (blue ) in the U.S. News rankings, as of 2020

In 1983, U.S. News & World Report published its first "America's Best Colleges" report. The rankings have been compiled and published annually since 1985 and are the most widely quoted of their kind in the United States.

The rankings are split into four categories: National Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges, with the latter two categories further split into North, South, Midwest, and West. The rankings are based upon data that U.S. News & World Report collects from an annual survey sent to each school, as well as opinion surveys of faculty members and administrators from other schools. The publication's methodology was created by Robert Morse, who continues to oversee its application as chief data strategist.[22]

The rankings are popular with the general public (for their 2014 release, usnews.com garnered 2.6 million unique visitors and 18.9 million page views in one day[23]), and influence high school seniors' application patterns (a 2011 study found that a one-rank improvement leads to a 0.9% increase in number of applicants[24]). However, they have been widely denounced by many higher education experts. Detractors argue that they ignore individual fit by comparing institutions with widely diverging missions on the same scale,[25] imply a false precision by deriving an ordinal ranking from questionable data,[26] encourage gamesmanship by institutions looking to improve their rank,[27] and contribute to the admissions frenzy by unduly highlighting prestige.[28]

In addition to the rankings, U.S. News & World Report also publishes college guides in book form,[29] and ranks American graduate schools and academic programs in a number of specific disciplines, including business, law, engineering, nursing, and medicine.[30]

Criticism
Main articles: Criticism of college and university rankings (North America) and Criticism of college and university rankings (2007 United States)

During the 1990s, several educational institutions in the United States were involved in a movement to boycott the U.S. News & World Report college rankings survey. The first was Reed College, which stopped submitting the survey in 1995. The survey was also criticized by Alma College, Stanford University, and St. John's College during the late 1990s.[31] SAT scores play a role in The U.S. News & World Report college rankings even though U.S. News is not empowered with the ability to formally verify or recalculate the scores that are represented to them by schools. Since the mid-1990s there have been many instances documented by the popular press wherein schools lied about their SAT scores in order to obtain a higher ranking.[32] An exposé in the San Francisco Chronicle stated that the elements in the methodology of U.S News & World Report's rankings are redundant and can be reduced to one thing: money.[33] On June 19, 2007, during the annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, members discussed the letter to college presidents asking them not to participate in the "reputation survey" section of the U.S. News & World Report survey (this section comprises 25% of the ranking).

As a result, "a majority of the approximately 80 presidents at the meeting said that they did not intend to participate in the U.S. News reputational rankings in the future."[34] The statement also said that its members "have agreed to participate in the development of an alternative common format that presents information about their colleges for students and their families to use in the college search process".[35] This database will be web-based and developed in conjunction with higher-education organizations including the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and the Council of Independent Colleges.

On June 22, 2007, U.S. News & World Report editor Robert Morse issued a response in which he argued, "in terms of the peer assessment survey, we at U.S. News firmly believe the survey has significant value because it allows us to measure the 'intangibles' of a college that we can't measure through statistical data. Plus, the reputation of a school can help get that all-important first job and plays a key part in which grad school someone will be able to get into. The peer survey is by nature subjective, but the technique of asking industry leaders to rate their competitors is a commonly accepted practice. The results from the peer survey also can act to level the playing field between private and public colleges."[36] In reference to the alternative database discussed by the Annapolis Group, Morse also argued, "It's important to point out that the Annapolis Group's stated goal of presenting college data in a common format has been tried before [...] U.S. News has been supplying this exact college information for many years already. And it appears that NAICU will be doing it with significantly less comparability and functionality. U.S. News first collects all these data (using an agreed-upon set of definitions from the Common Data Set). Then we post the data on our website in easily accessible, comparable tables. In other words, the Annapolis Group and the others in the NAICU initiative actually are following the lead of U.S. News."[36]

Some higher education experts, such as Kevin Carey of Education Sector, have asserted that U.S. News & World Report's college rankings system is merely a list of criteria that mirrors the superficial characteristics of elite colleges and universities. According to Carey, the U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity. He suggests that there are more important characteristics parents and students should research to select colleges, such as how well students are learning and how likely students are to earn a degree.[37]

The question of college rankings and their impact on admissions gained greater attention in March 2007, when Dr. Michele Tolela Myers (the former President of Sarah Lawrence College) shared in an op-ed[38] that the U.S. News & World Report, when not given SAT scores for a university, chooses to simply rank the college with an invented SAT score of approximately one standard deviation (roughly 200 SAT points) behind those of peer colleges, with the reasoning being that SAT-optional universities will, because of their test-optional nature, accept higher numbers of less academically capable students.

In a 2011 article regarding the Sarah Lawrence controversy, Peter Sacks of The Huffington Post criticized the U.S. News rankings' centering on test scores and denounced the magazine's "best colleges" list as a scam:[39]

In the U.S. News worldview of college quality, it matters not a bit what students actually learn on campus, or how a college actually contributes to the intellectual, ethical and personal growth of students while on campus, or how that institution contributes to the public good [...] and then, when you consider that student SAT scores are profoundly correlated [to] parental income and education levels – the social class that a child is born into and grows up with – you begin to understand what a corrupt emperor 'America's Best Colleges' really is. The ranking amounts to little more than a pseudo-scientific and yet popularly legitimate tool for perpetuating inequality between educational haves and have nots – the rich families from the poor ones, and the well-endowed schools from the poorly endowed ones.

Best global universities
Main article: U.S. News & World Report Best Global University Ranking

In October 2014, the U.S. News & World Report published its inaugural "Best Global Universities" rankings.[40] Inside Higher Ed noted that the U.S. News is entering into the international college and university rankings area that is already "dominated by three major global university rankings," namely the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, and the QS World University Rankings.[41] Robert Morse stated that "it's natural for U.S. News to get into this space."[41] Morse also noted that the U.S. News "will also be the first American publisher to enter the global rankings space".[41]

Best hospitals
Main article: U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Rankings

Since 1990, U.S. News & World Report has compiled the Best Hospitals rankings.[42] The Best Hospitals rankings are specifically based on a different methodology that looks at difficult (high acuity) cases within 16 specialties, including cancer; diabetes and endocrinology; ear, nose and throat; gastroenterology; geriatrics; gynecology; heart and heart surgery; kidney disorders; neurology and neurosurgery; ophthalmology; orthopedics; psychiatry; pulmonology; rehabilitation; rheumatology; and urology.[43][44] In addition to rankings for each of these specialties, hospitals that excel in many U.S. News areas are ranked in the Honor Roll.[45]

Best cars

Since 2007, U.S. News has developed an innovative rankings system for new and used automobiles. The rankings span over 30 classes of cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, wagons, and sports cars. Each automobile receives an overall score, as well as a performance, interior, and recommendation score to the nearest tenth on a 1-10 scale. Scores are based on the consensus opinion of America's trusted automotive experts, as well as reliability and safety data.[46] U.S. News also produces annual "Best Cars for the Money" and "Best Cars for Families" awards across approximately 20 classes of cars, trucks, SUVs, and minivans. Money award winners are derived by combining vehicle price and five-year cost of ownership with the opinion of the automotive press,[47] while family awards are tabulated by combining critics' opinions with the vehicle's availability of family-friendly features and interior space, as well as safety and reliability data. Money and family award winners are announced in February and March of each year, respectively.[48]

Best states
Education ranking, 2019: 01-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50

In 2017, U.S. News published its first ranking of all 50 U.S. states, incorporating metrics in seven categories: health care, education, crime and corrections, infrastructure, opportunity, economy, and government. The weighting of the individual categories in determining overall rank was informed by surveys on what matters most to residents. Massachusetts occupied the top rank, and Louisiana ranked worst.[49]

In 2018 the 8 categories were: health care, education, economy, opportunity, infrastructure, crime & corrections, fiscal stability, and quality of life. Iowa occupied the top rank, and Louisiana ranked worst.[50]

In 2019 natural environment replaced the quality of life category. Washington occupied the top rank, and Louisiana ranked worst.[51]

See also

References
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  2. Luca, Michael; Smith, Jonathan (September 27, 2011). "Salience in Quality Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. News College Rankings". Leadership and Management. Archived from the original on November 7, 2013. Retrieved September 29, 2011.
  3. David E. Sumner (May 2012). "American winners and losers:2001 to 2010" (PDF). International Conference on Communication, Media, Technology and Design. Istanbul. Retrieved June 25, 2016.
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