According to the Associated Press, most students are not very worried about college rankings, often epitomized annually in US News & World Report. Instead of altering the behavior of students and parents since the annual rankings began years ago, the largest changes in behavior have allegedly occurred within the administrative offices of colleges: Scandals have revealed that schools have engaged in unethical or illegal activities to boost their rankings, often in the form of falsifying admissions scores to make their students appear more competitive.
Luke Myers and Jonathan Robe at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity provide a history and a critique of the prevailing college rankings systems in a March 2009 report.
* 1900: Inspired by society's preoccupation with social status, Englishman Alick Maclean lists how many "eminent men" have attended certain universities.
* 1904: Havelock Ellis publishes a list of universities ranked by how many "geniuses" had attended them.
* 1906: A much larger and more elaborate listing was compiled in the U.S. by psychologist James Cattell, with the thousand most distinguished men noted by asterisk.
* 1910: James Cattell updates his listing with more information on the academic background of the men, placing the data pertaining to academic affiliation in a separate table and thereby creating the first official college ranking system.
* 1921: Geographer Stephen Visher creates the method of comparing distinguished students to the total number of enrolled students, thereby helping determine a school's "potency" in producing leaders.
* 1924: Miami University professor Raymond Hughes creates a more modern system for determining academic quality by polling professors as to the quality of programs of study at other universities. Colleges were ranked according to the scores of their programs of study on a 1-5 scale. This system was improved and expanded by Hughes in 1934. This system is dubbed "reputational ranking."
*1930-1951: Beverly Kunkel and Donald Prentice analyze a college's academic quality by determining the number of its undergraduate alumni listed in Who's Who in America.
* 1910-early 1960s: Rankings of colleges and universities often occurs only in the context of "distinguished persons," therefore excluding most public, "land-grant" universities that existed in the West and Midwest.
* 1966: Reputational ranking becomes the most popular form of college ranking after the publishing of Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education by Allan Cartter. The report achieved critical and commercial success, with over 26,000 copies sold.
* Late 1950s - early 1980s: Reputational rankings predominantly focus on graduate institutions as opposed to undergraduate programs. Only in 1981 does a report by Lewis Solmon and Alexander Astin bring methodological rigor back to rankings of undergraduate programs.
* 1982: Non-reputational factors are included in major reputational rankings for the first time, including factors like library size, research and publication statistics, and characteristics of graduates.
* 1983: US News & World Report begins publishing its undergraduate reputational ranking, revolutionizing public awareness of college rankings.
* 1988: As US News' college rankings become increasingly popular, including the launch of an annual book-length college guide, criticism mounts and forces an increase in the amount of objective data (such as percentage of applicants accepted and graduation rates) and a decrease in the amount of reputational data used to rank colleges and universities.
* 1989: James Schmotter of Cornell argues that universities have only themselves to blame for the increasing proliferation of college ranking systems. Because institutions of higher education did not create their own ranking systems that were both relevant and understandable to the layman, publishers could create less-accurate ranking systems that were popular with the public.
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