PROVIDENCE – Last year, the Rhode Island School of Design was one of 13 local colleges and universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report as among the best colleges across the country.
That will no longer be the case moving forward.
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In a communication to the campus community, RISD President Crystal Williams announced the arts school will no longer participate in U.S. News’ annual best colleges rankings. Williams said RISD does not measure the value of its students or academic programs based on the same factors and methods used by U.S. News.
RISD says that until the 2022 ranking, the arts school was categorized by U.S. News and other art and design schools as “Specialty Schools: Art.” RISD in that category was unranked.
But then, in 2022, RISD appeared in multiple rankings in the Regional Universities North category. Among those rankings, RISD was ranked No. 3 in both the Regional Universities North and Most Innovative Schools categories. Williams said RISD was put in that regional category “as a result of small curriculum changes.”
RISD, as a result, was placed in a category with other colleges and universities that shared “very little in common” with the arts school, Williams said, prompting the school to reconsider being part of the annual rankings.
“Many of those criteria have been written about in critical terms and publicly questioned, and are unambiguously biased in favor of wealth, privilege and opportunities that are inequitably distributed,” Williams said.
RISD is the second local college to cease participating in the publication’s ranking program and among a handful of higher education institutions across the U.S. who have done the same. Roger Williams University School of Law last month announced it will too not submit data to U.S. News going forward.
RWU Law Dean Gregory W. Bowman said in a letter to the campus community that he shared similar concerns with other law school deans about flaws in U.S. News’ rankings formula. He hopes the publication will listen to national critique and “reevaluate its ranking practices in meaningful ways that center on the student experience, diversity and social impact.”
The controversy began back in September not long after U.S. News’ latest rankings came out when Columbia University admitted to submitting inaccurate data to U.S. News the previous year for the annual ranking program. According to CNN, U.S. News initially removed Columbia from the 2022 ranking, but later dropped the university from second to 18th after Columbia declined to submit new data for the 2022 program.
Since then, the law programs at Harvard University, Yale University and the University of California Berkeley, the Duke University School of Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School and the Stanford University School of Medicine are among other colleges who have also opted out of U.S. News’ rankings moving forward.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
