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BACKGROUND: U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of the top 50 American hospitals in 12 specialties are based on a combination of subjective and objective measures of quality. Although the rankings have been criticized for emphasizing the subjective reputation of hospitals too strongly, the role of reputation in determining the relative standings of the top 50 hospitals has not been quantified. OBJECTIVE: To quantify the role of reputation in determining the relative standings of the top 50 hospitals in the 2009 edition of U.S. News & World Report's rankings. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: The top 50 hospitals in each of 12 specialties. MEASUREMENTS: Rankings based on the total U.S. News score and on a subjective reputation score. RESULTS: On average, rankings based on reputation score alone agreed with U.S. News & World Report's overall rankings 100% of the time for the top hospital in each specialty, 97% for the top 5 hospitals, 91% for the top 10 hospitals, and 89% for the top 20 hospitals. Hospital reputation was minimally associated with objective quality measures (mean Spearman rho(2) = 0.03). LIMITATION: The findings apply primarily to interpretations about the relative standings of the 50 top-ranked hospitals in each specialty and not necessarily to the hundreds of unranked hospitals. CONCLUSION: The relative standings of the top 50 hospitals largely reflect the subjective reputations of those hospitals. Moreover, little relationship exists between subjective reputation and objective measures of hospital quality among the top 50 hospitals. PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE: None.

Research has shown that sustainability reporting can positively influence organizational accountability and transparency. However, little research has been done to compare how sectors present their sustainability efforts. This research uses content analysis to examine how the two sectors leading reporting efforts detail their work. Specifically, sustainability reports published in 2020 were sought from the Fortune 50 and the top 50 institutions from U.S. News & World Report (USNWR)’s Best Global University rankings to examine compliance with the standard reporting frameworks and how the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were presented. Results suggest Fortune 500 companies and educational institutions did not report sustainability in the same fashion, nor did either grouping follow a standardized reporting framework. For-profit corporations were more likely to publish a stand-alone sustainability report and more likely to address more of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

This Invited Commentary amplifies the continuing critique of the U.S. News & World Report rankings of U.S. medical schools and academic medical centers. The article begins with a critical quote about the medical school rankings published in this journal nearly 20 years ago and points out that little has changed in nearly two decades. The author then reports how the flawed rankings are performed and why U.S. medical school rankings are taken seriously, addresses the varied missions of U.S. medical schools, describes what really matters for success in medical school and professional life, sets a path forward to improve methods of medical school evaluation, and speaks to the irony of dismissing the rankings while still using them for marketing and fund-raising. The article concludes with a critical argument about the U.S. News & World Report rankings not only of medical schools but also of schools across the learned professions.

The U.S. News & World Report annual rankings play a key role in ordering the market for legal education, and, by extension, the market for entry level lawyers. This Article explores the impact and evolution of placement and post-graduation data, which are important input variables that comprise twenty percent of the total rankings methodology. In general, we observe clear evidence that law schools are seeking to maximize each placement and post-graduation input variable. During the 1997 to 2006 time period, law schools in all four tiers posted large average gains in employment rates upon graduation and nine months, which appear to result from a combination of competition and gaming strategies. In addition, law schools in tiers 2, 3, and 4 have increased 1L academic attrition, which may be an attempt to increase the U.S. News bar passage score. We also use multivariate regression analysis to model the employed at graduation and employed at nine months input variables. We find that the following factors are associated with higher employed at graduation rates: (1) higher 25th percentile Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) scores, (2) more on-campus interviews (OCI), (3) higher percentage of part-time students, (4) location outside a Top 10 corporate law market, and (5) status as a historically black law school. All of these factors except LSAT and OCI activity vanish when examining the employed at nine months data. The U.S. News Lawyer/Judge reputation score is associated with higher employment at nine months. Further research on the Lawyer/Judge survey instrument is needed. After presenting our empirical results, we critique the specific measures of postgraduation success used in the U.S. News rankings and explain how each can be improved. We conclude that the best solution to law schools’ complaints about the impact of U.S. News rankings is greater data availability and transparency, particularly on post-graduation outcomes and other factors affecting students’ eventual employment prospects.

Previous studies of U.S. war coverage have identified a narrow range of visual portrayals that reflect American-centric, government source-directed frames. This study found that the three major U.S. news magazines echoed those patterns during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A content analysis of 2,258 images revealed that TIME, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report framed the first 16 months of the Iraq War from an American-centered perspective, focusing on conflict, politicians, and human interest. The news weeklies generally neglected alternative viewpoints, such as antiwar protests, destruction, Iraqi military leaders and troops, and the human toll. Nor did readers see many Iraqi and American females, children, the injured, or the dead, as they appeared in less than 12% of the images.

ABSTRACT U.S. News & World Report has published a ranking of the top 50 MBA programs since 1990. Today, there are more than a half dozen different rankings of MBA programs and they are so popular and powerful, that prospective students, alumni, legislators, college presidents, deans, and admissions officers wait with bated breath to see where their school will be ranked. This qualitative study looked behind the numbers of the U.S. News & World Report ranking to discover the perceptual impact of the ranking on eight differentially ranked, public MBA schools, as perceived by 45 faculty and administrators. Three schools from the top 25, three from the bottom 25, and two unranked schools participated. Many themes emerged from the data and supported much that has been reported in the literature regarding the rankings, including the notion that rankings matter! The implications for future research, policy, and practice for administrators, faculty and other interested parties are discussed.

Since their first appearance in 1983, the U.S. News and World Report rankings of colleges and graduate schools have generated much discussion and debate, from some declaring them among the best rankings ever published to others describing them as shallow, inaccurate, and even dangerous. The research presented here addresses two of the most common criticisms of the methodology used to produce these rankings. In particular, this study answers the following questions: What is the extent of change in U.S. News' ranking formulas across years and what are the implications for interpreting shifts in a school's rank over time? How precise is the overall score that U.S. News uses to rank schools and what are the implications for assigning schools to discrete ranks? Findings confirm critic's concerns in each of these areas, particularly in relation to the ranking of graduate schools of education. Based on these results, five recommendations are made for improving the interpretability and usefulness of the rankings.

BACKGROUND: The rankings of "America's Best Hospitals" by U.S. News & World Report are influential, but the performance of ranked hospitals in caring for patients with routine cardiac conditions such as heart failure is not known. METHODS AND RESULTS: Using hierarchical regression models based on medical administrative data from the period July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, we calculated risk-standardized mortality rates and risk-standardized readmission rates for ranked and nonranked hospitals in the treatment of heart failure. The mortality analysis examined 14 813 patients in 50 ranked hospitals and 409 806 patients in 4761 nonranked hospitals. The readmission analysis included 16 641 patients in 50 ranked hospitals and 458 473 patients in 4627 nonranked hospitals. Mean 30-day risk-standardized mortality rates were lower in ranked versus nonranked hospitals (10.1% versus 11.2%, P<0.01), whereas mean 30-day risk-standardized readmission rates were no different between ranked and nonranked hospitals (23.6% versus 23.8%, P=0.40). The 30-day risk-standardized mortality rates varied widely for both ranked and nonranked hospitals, ranging from 7.9% to 12.4% for ranked hospitals and from 7.1% to 17.5% for nonranked hospitals. The 30-day risk-standardized readmission rates also spanned a large range, from 18.7% to 29.3% for ranked hospitals and from 19.2% to 29.8% for nonranked hospitals. CONCLUSIONS: Hospitals ranked by U.S. News & World Report as "America's Best Hospitals" in "Heart & Heart Surgery" are more likely than nonranked hospitals to have a significantly lower than expected 30-day mortality rate, but there was much overlap in performance. For readmission, the rates were similar in ranked and nonranked hospitals.

Despite numerous commentaries on Gulf War reporting, there has been little systematic analysis of the visual depiction of the war. This study reports the findings of a visual content analysis of 1,104 war-related pictures appearing in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News &amp; World Report during “Desert Storm.” The analysis indicates that a narrowly limited range of images, with a special emphasis on cataloguing military weaponry and technology, dominated the pictorial coverage. Moreover, the scarcity of pictures depicting ongoing events in the Gulf contradicts the impression of first-hand media coverage promoted during the conflict.

In recent years, there has been a tremendous proliferation of quantitative evaluative social measures in the field of law as well as society generally. One of these measures, the U.S. News &amp; World Report rankings of law schools, has become an almost obsessive concern of the law school community, generating a great deal of speculation about the effects of these rankings on legal education. However, there has been no attempt to systematically ascertain what, if any, effects these rankings have on the decisionmaking of students and schools in the admission process. This article documents some of these effects by conceptualizing rankings as a signal of law school quality, investigating (1) whether students and schools use this signal to make decisions about where to apply and whom to admit, and (2) whether the creation of this signal distorts the phenomenon—law school quality—that it purports to measure. Using data for U.S. law schools from 1996 to 2003, we find that schools' rankings have significant effects on both the decisions of prospective students and the decisions schools make in the admissions process. In addition, we present evidence that the rankings can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for some schools, as the effects of rank described above alter the profile of their student bodies, affecting their future rank. Cumulatively, these findings suggest that the rankings help create rather than simply reflect differences among law schools through the magnification of the small, and statistically random, distinctions produced by the measurement apparatus.

Processes of certification and evaluation are some of the most powerful institutional forces in organizational fields, and in the higher education field, rankings are a primary factor in assessing organizational performance. This article explores the institutional effects of the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings on the reputational assessments made by senior administrators at peer universities and liberal arts colleges. In the estimation of structural equation models, we found that published college rankings have a significant impact on future peer assessments, independent of changes in organizational quality and performance and even of prior peer assessments of reputation.

Despite the widespread popularity of the U.S. News & World Report College rankings there has been no empirical analysis of the impact of these rankings on applications, admissions, and enrollment decisions, as well as on institutions' pricing policies. Our analyses indicate that a less favorable rank leads an institution to accept a greater percentage of its applicants, a smaller percentage of its admitted applicants matriculate, and the resulting entering class is of lower quality, as measured by its average SAT scores.

This research investigates the reliability and validity of three major publications’ rankings of MBA programs. Each set of rankings showed reasonable consistency over time, both at the level of the overall rankings and for most of the facets from which the rankings are derived. Each set of rankings also showed some levels of convergent and discriminant validity, but each has room for improvement, particularly Businessweek, which relies heavily on subjective surveys of students and recruiters, and Financial Times, whose methodology may be simplified and streamlined, ceasing to measure facets that are empirically superfluous. Together the three publications blanket the student process — U.S. News & World Report captures incoming student quality clearly with GMAT scores, Businessweek captures whether the students are happy while at their respective business schools, and U.S. News captures salaries and Financial Times captures return on investment, as short-term and longer term indicators of graduates’ early career successes.

The annual U.S News &amp; World Report ranking of the nation's academic institutions exacerbates their competitiveness. Institutions, trying to influence the rankings, alter their behavior in ways that misserve individual students and higher education as a whole. However, institutions should not use the rankings as an excuse for failing to collaborate in ways that make sense both educationally and financially. The paper suggests how USNWR rankings could encourage such collaborations.

PURPOSE: The annual U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) Primary Care Medical School (PCMS) ranking attracts considerable attention, but its measurement properties have not been published. The authors examined the short-term stability of the PCMS ranking and the PCMS score from which it derives, along with the short-term spread of schools' rankings. METHOD: The authors employed published data and methods to reconstruct the 2009-2012 PCMS scores and rankings. They used mixed-effects models to assess the within-school, between-year reliability (short-term stability) of the PCMS score and ranking, yielding intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs). They defined short-term spread as the median within-school range in ranking across the four-year study period. RESULTS: Reconstructed PCMS scores correlated highly with published scores all four years (Pearson correlations≥98.9%). Most schools' mean annual PCMS scores were tightly clustered near the center of the score distribution. ICCs for the PCMS score and ranking were, respectively, 94% and 90%. The median difference between the best and worst ranking over the study period was 4 for the 18 schools with an average annual ranking of 1 to 20, and 17 for the other 89 schools (P<.001, Kruskal-Wallis test). CONCLUSIONS: The short-term stability of the USN&WR PCMS score and ranking were reasonably good. However, the short-term spread in PCMS rankings was large, particularly among schools with mean annual rankings below the top 20. The variability is greater than could be plausibly attributed to actual changes in training quality. These findings raise questions regarding the ranking's validity and usefulness.

[Excerpt] This paper examines the widely popular Business Week and U.S. News &World Report rankings of the top business schools to determine their impact on the admissions outcomes, pricing policies, and career placement outcomes of the business schools they rank. The analysis indicates that both ranking systems have a significant impact on students and administrators in the short term and long term, but employers are only impacted by long-term changes in ranking. While both ranking systems are shown to have significant effects, some evidence indicates that Business Week’s ranking is slightly more influential with students and significantly more influential with recruiters. In general, a fall in either ranking system leads a school to become less selective because its applicant pool shrinks and declines in quality, and a smaller percentage of applicants who are accepted matriculate. In addition, administrators are forced to either cut tuition or increase grant and scholarship aid to attract more students from its declining applicant pool. A more favorable ranking allows a school to become more selective as it attracts higher quality students who are more eager to attend the university, and the school can then decrease its grant and scholarship aid or slightly raise its tuition. Employers do not respond to yearly changes in rank, but a prolonged change in a school’s ranking by either system leads employers to change their behavior. A long-term increase in a program’s ranking leads to more of its students obtaining job offers, higher salaries for these offers, and more offers per student, in addition to an overall increase in the value of the MBA (as measured by change in salary). Similarly, a program which encounters a long-term decline in rank will see fewer of its students obtain lower-paying jobs, fewer options for each student, and a devaluing of the program’s MBA.

Excerpt] So institutions at all places in the selectivity game are thinking about their US News & World Report (USNWR) rankings. In the next section of the paper I will discuss the formula that USNWR used to compute its rankings in its America’s Best Colleges: 2001 issue and show how the elements that constitute it have altered how colleges and universities behave. Sometimes an action taken to improve an institution’s rankings may also make educational sense. However, sometimes it may not and it may also not be in the best interest of our educational system as a whole. In the final section of the paper, I ask whether the methodology that USNWR uses to calculate its rankings prevents institutions from collaborating in ways that make sense both educationally and economically. My answer is to a large extent no. Hence, while the USNWR rankings may have caused institutions to worry more about the peers with which they compete, the ranking should not prevent the institutions from working productively towards common goals. Put another way, institutions should not blame USNWR for their failure to collaborate more.

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