USNWR Veterans List

Most prospective students look into their school ranking in order to assess the value of a degree from the institution in question. Many of the most prestigious private liberal arts schools are members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), an organization that includes the 'Ancient Eight' Ivies and the five surviving Seven Sisters. U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) has one of the most popular ranking systems, for public and private universities alike, and they recently added school ranking specifically aimed at veterans.Their methodology reads like someone pencil-drilled it, however, which doesn’t reflect well on the USNWR commitment to prospective student veterans. Self-reporting by schools is neither objective nor reliable. For one, if a school habitually preyed upon vets for government subsidized tuition, which is common among for profit colleges, then they could simply lie in order to get themselves on the list and thereby attract more veterans. Secondly, ranked schools don’t always keep verifiable records of veteran students and their use of benefits. Wick Sloane of Inside Higher Ed has been tracking precisely this failure of student data tracking since 2010.Nor is the method employed by USNWR very critical. All that is required to be on the veteran specific list are three boiler-plate criteria;

1. The institution is certified for the GI Bill.
2. The institution participates in the Yellow Ribbon Program or is a public school that charges in-state tuition to all out-of-state veterans.
3. The institution is in the top half of its U.S. News ranking category and had 20 or more students who used GI Bill benefits to partially or fully finance their tuition the prior year.

The above three points are all pass/fail; there aren’t any measurables specific to veterans at all. Read closely and you’ll find that the list is just the regular national breakdown without any actual reassessment whatsoever; “U.S. News ranked qualifying schools numerically and in descending order based on their 2017 Best Colleges ranks.” USWNR could have been more honest by calling it “The Best Colleges we picked that also happen to accept free government funds for enrolling students with a proven track record for maturity and high achievement.”