Not only is Berkeley unlikely to raise its score enough to top the 2020 rankings, but its prior rankings may be called into question.
This is terrible timing for the school’s reputation, even though, as alumni giving only accounts for 5% of the ranking, it’s unclear how much this misreporting would have altered UC Berkeley’s historical rankings. The school had long been the highest-ranked public university on the list, with UCLA in a close second, but when the 2019 rankings were announced, UCLA came in first for the first time .
College rankings are, despite ranking institutions’ best efforts, always going to be somewhat arbitrary. Shifts in colleges’ rankings often say more about changes in that years’ methodology than changes in that college. Still, it would be disingenuous to imply that the rankings don’t matter. A 2014 study found that, although shifts of +/- four spots should be considered ‘noise,’ for most schoolsto break into the top 30 or so universities.
U.S. News will be releasing their 2020 rankings this September, so Berkeley’s fall from grace will likely be short-lived. However, there are a host of rising high school seniors who are currently working to decide which schools to apply to—and many of them start with the rankings before narrowing down based on personal preference.
The larger issue is that it took someone from Berkeley telling US News about the error for them to realize. US News itself admits that “U.S. News relies on schools to accurately report their data, and U.S. News reviews the Best Colleges data in a number of different ways. This includes flagging year-over-year discrepancies, comparing data against federal government sources when available and asking a school official to sign off on the school's data.
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