Are U.S. News’ Rankings Inherently Biased Against Black Colleges?
By Margaret Kamara

The U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings have long had their share of critics, and Dr. Walter Kimbrough, president of historically Black Philander Smith College, is trying to enlist his HBCU counterparts in boycotting the rankings.

Kimbrough says the magazine focuses on institutional resources, student selectivity and graduation rates to select the top institutions. But since many HBCUs struggle with these issues, he says the rankings in effect discourage students from going to those schools.

“If there are people looking at the rankings as a measurement of the quality of an institution, they think [HBCUs] do not have any type of qualities,” says Kimbrough. “[The rankings] do not tell you who the best schools are, just the most privileged.”

This is why Kimbrough, who opposes all college rankings, recently joined forces with the Educational Conservancy in a letter campaign to college leaders urging them to stop completing a peer assessment U.S. News relies on and to stop using their schools’ rankings in promotional materials.

The Educational Conservancy is a nonprofit group working to end commercial interference in college admissions. The organization has also campaigned to end early admissions programs, which some argue are unfair to minority and low-income students. As of press time, 28 other presidents had joined the boycott campaign.

Lloyd Thacker, author of College Unranked and CEO of the Educational Conservancy, says that he is very pleased by the prospects of HBCU presidents aligning their institutions with the campaign, which he says goes beyond the rankings issue.

“Over the 29 years that I have worked in education, I have watched college admissions be influenced by billion-dollar college consultant industries that have transformed education into products, students into consumers and colleges into businesses,” he says.