I Don’t Want to Think About Rankings this Year

Posted on April 8, 2025 by JP Leider

This entry is part 54 of 64 in the series Wide World of Public Health Systems

Honestly, in a different year maybe we could all just acknowledge that the US News & World Report Rankings (“Rankings”) are trash and don’t really reflect the quality of our programs, and leave it at that. Really. After endless blogs, commentaries, similar stories from other fields, and truly crazy news stories about people trying to game the system, it would be really nice to just let it go. But it’s hard to give a pass to an institution that releases rankings during National Public Health Week that are so fundamentally broken in a time when we so fundamentally need good data to communicate about the importance of public health.

I’m not sure how many academic types are reading this, I sort of assume it’s all of you. If we are being real, these past several weeks have made it much harder to answer students’ questions about what they should expect post-graduation. It’s pretty easy to extol the virtues of undergraduate or graduate public health education, of the skills gained, of the import to society. But what about a career?

During times of economic turmoil, increased competition among schools, and substantial, foundational, uncertainty about what’s next, applicants should be able to trust the data they come across online from reputable sources to help make decisions as important as graduate school. How do we trust a ranking system based on a single perception measure, one that had a 37% response rate this year?

I sure don’t.

What do we see in the new Rankings? Well inexplicably, it seems like people think their peers’ programs are doing better compared to the previous year. Like, a lot better. On a five-point scale of perceived program quality (1-marginal to 5-outstanding), the median increased from 2.4 to 2.8 in a single year. Congratulations must be in order for such a field-wide improvement in our programs! Otherwise, might be that after eggs, autos, and produce, inflation is coming for the Rankings.

Another view emphasizes this point. Take a look at the minimum score in a given group (the horizontal bar). Those in the 150+ group moved up from a 1.7 to a 2.2 from 2024 to 2025. Now, this may be a function of the ‘trimming’ USNWR is now doing (they say they are dropping the two highest and two lowest 1-5 rankings). However, if dropping just four Scores is enough to move the median in this way, it gives us a pretty good sense of just how few people are rating certain schools and programs.

Every school is on a journey in these Rankings over the past almost 20 years. The pool of schools awarding degrees has (legitimately) expanded dramatically. Stalwarts of the Top 10 and Top 20 are facing considerable perception issues among their peers.

Then again, a number of schools saw their Scores increase year-to-year, only to have their Rankings fall. Bummer.

As ever, let me close with three points.

1) The Rankings are practically and mathematically quite bad for our field, and we ought to move collectively beyond them.

2) Especially during challenging times, applicants will be looking for differentiators – the Rankings are not necessarily sound reflections of program quality, and certainly cannot speak to applicant fit. In a world where it is easy to conflate those two, prudentially we collectively must do more for applicants.

3) Never forget that these Rankings are, to use a technical term, hot garbage. They are based on a single measure of perceived peer program quality, one that had just over one-third of invitees respond. For a field based on data…not great.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me to NORC’s recent report on College Rankings and alternatives. Well worth a read.

About the Author

JP Leider: Dr. JP Leider is the Director of the Center for Public Health Systems at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and a member of the JPHMP Editorial Board. He is available at leider (at) umn (dot) edu.

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