us news college ranking 2022

U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking is an annual set of rankings of colleges and universities in the United States, which was first published by U.S. News & World Report in 1983. It has been described as the most influential institutional ranking in the country. The Best Colleges rankings have raised controversy, and they have been denounced by several education experts. Detractors argue that they rely on self-reported, sometimes fraudulent data by the institutions, encourage gamesmanship by institutions looking to improve their rank, imply a false precision by deriving an ordinal ranking from questionable data, contribute to the admissions frenzy by unduly highlighting prestige, and ignore individual fit by comparing institutions with widely diverging missions on the same scale. In 2022, Columbia University was lowered from second to 18th in the rankings after a report by Columbia University mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus, which revealed that Columbia University misreported data to U.S. News & World Report. The remaining "national universities" were not renumbered.