College admissions officers have a complicated relationship with rankings. They increasingly question whether the lists carry the authority they once did, they can identify obvious limitations in the way a complicated institution gets compressed into a single position, and some openly acknowledge that the process does not feel fair. Then, when the next ranking cycle comes around, most of their institutions participate anyway.
That is the contradiction at the center of a new Kaplan survey released September 22. Among admissions officers from 213 national, regional and liberal-arts colleges and universities, 70 percent said college rankings have lost some of their prestige in recent years. The number is not a temporary spike in frustration. It is exactly where Kaplan found it in 2025, and it remains substantially higher than the 56 percent who said the same thing in 2023. In 2024, the figure reached 75 percent.
Yet 88 percent of the institutions represented in the 2026 survey plan to continue participating in the rankings and have no plans to withdraw. One admissions officer summarized the bind unusually well: "It does not feel like a fair playing field, but knowing it means something to families, we have to do it."
That makes this less a story about whether college rankings are good or bad than a story about what happens after confidence in a measurement begins to weaken but the measurement itself remains socially powerful. A number does not need universal trust in order to shape behavior. It only needs enough people to believe that everybody else will continue reacting to it.
For a college, the relevant audience is not limited to prospective students. Rankings can be watched by parents, trustees, alumni, donors, administrators, faculty, competitors and local media. A school may have reservations about what a list actually captures while still understanding that a movement up or down can become a headline, a recruiting point, a fundraising conversation or an uncomfortable question in a boardroom. Skepticism of the methodology does not remove the consequences attached to the result.
Families face the same problem from the other side. Choosing a college requires comparing institutions across tuition, financial aid, geography, majors, graduation rates, career outcomes, campus culture, housing, student life, class size, debt, reputation and the much harder-to-quantify question of whether a particular student will actually be happy there. That is a tremendous amount of ambiguity to hold at once. A ranking offers something psychologically attractive: compression. Hundreds of variables become a number that appears to make institutions comparable.
The number does not have to be complete to be useful, and it does not have to be fully trusted to feel reassuring. This is why rankings can lose prestige without losing relevance. They provide a shared reference point in a decision that otherwise contains very few universal reference points. Even people who know the number cannot tell the whole story may still ask for the number because it gives everyone something concrete to discuss.
There is some evidence that students themselves may already be using rankings more loosely than institutions fear. A 2024 Art & Science Group survey, reported by Inside Higher Ed, found that about 60 percent of surveyed college-bound students used rankings at all, and many used them primarily as a source of general information rather than as a strict ordering they intended to follow.
That suggests the cultural power of rankings may not come from a simple population of teenagers dutifully enrolling in numerical order. It may come from the accumulation of many different audiences using the same ranking for slightly different purposes.
That distinction matters because it helps explain why a system can persist even when almost nobody describes it as perfect. Parents may use the ranking as reassurance. Students may use it as a discovery tool. College leaders may monitor it because donors and trustees monitor it. Admissions teams may participate because they believe families expect them to. Media outlets use the rankings because readers recognize them. Each group can privately discount the number while publicly keeping it in circulation.
The mechanism is familiar well beyond higher education. Social-media follower counts can influence perceived authority even when everyone knows followers do not equal expertise. Star ratings can steer purchases even when shoppers know the averages may flatten wildly different experiences. Workplace dashboards can become organizational priorities even when employees understand that a KPI captures only one part of useful work. Standardized scores, engagement totals and performance metrics can all begin as attempts to describe reality and eventually become part of the environment people must navigate.
At that point, the measurement has become more than information. It has become infrastructure. People make decisions in anticipation of how other people will interpret it, and that anticipation gives the number power independent of anyone's private belief in its precision.
College rankings offer an especially clean example because even formal withdrawal does not necessarily remove an institution from the system. U.S. News has continued to rank colleges that decline to submit information by relying on publicly available data where possible. In other words, a college can decide it no longer wants to participate in the ritual and still find itself inside the output. The scoreboard can remain visible even after a player says it no longer wants to keep score.
Kaplan's own advice to families is appropriately broader than a numerical list. The company says rankings can be a useful starting point, but students should also examine affordability, financial aid, career preparation, employment outcomes and fit, and should speak directly with people connected to the institutions they are considering. That is not an argument that rankings contain no information. It is an argument against confusing the convenience of a summary with the complexity of the thing being summarized.
And that may be the more useful way to read the new survey. Seventy percent of admissions officers do not need to suddenly reject rankings for the finding to matter. Their skepticism already tells us something about the strange durability of modern metrics. The people closest to a system can understand its weaknesses, complain about its incentives and still conclude that leaving it would carry more risk than staying in it.
The ranking survives because everybody else still reacts to the ranking. Once that happens, the question is no longer simply whether the number is accurate. The harder question is whether any individual participant can afford to behave as though the number does not exist.
That leaves a larger behavioral question: when does a measurement stop being a description and become part of the machinery around the thing being measured? The Kaplan numbers do not answer that question by themselves, but the gap between 70 percent skepticism and 88 percent continued participation is a very good place to look for it.
The most durable metrics are not necessarily the ones everyone believes. They are the ones everyone expects everyone else to keep watching.
SOURCE NOTES
• Kaplan, “Admissions Officers’ Skepticism of College Rankings Remains High,” Sept. 22, 2026
• Inside Higher Ed, “New report shows college rankings are losing influence,” Sept. 10, 2024
• The Washington Post, background on U.S. News ranking nonparticipating institutions with public data, Sept. 18, 2023
Survey findings and ranking context attributed to Kaplan, Inside Higher Ed, and The Washington Post materials cited in SOURCE NOTES. Cultural framing is RMN's.