A long post in which we discuss where we fell, how we fell, why it doesn’t matter and why you should care anyway
In September, U.S. News & World Report published its annual list, ranking (the College of) William & Mary 51st among National Universities. This put us just ahead of UC Merced and behind Northeastern.
In 1988, when W&M first appeared in the USNWR rankings*1, it was ranked 22nd — just behind Caltech and ahead of Wisconsin. We reached a more recent peak of 29th in 2000 (happy 25th Reunion, everybody).
Even just 10 years ago, W&M was No. 33, safely in the top 50 nationwide and the sixth-best public university in the country. This was the neighborhood in which we spent the late 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s, rubbing elbows with Wake Forest (today 46th), Boston College (today 37th) and North Carolina (now 27th).
The rug pulled out from under
After some controversy, the 2019 rankings reflected an updated methodology: there would be no more reward for seeming “selective” by spamming high-school kids to apply en masse to schools where they had no hope of acceptance. Measures of social mobility rightfully grew in importance — like graduating more students from low-income families and Pell Grant recipients.
2019 was also amidst William & Mary’s $1 billion For the Bold campaign, which launched in 2015 with three major priorities: strengthening alumni ties (happy Homecoming, again) and reaching 40 percent alumni participation and scholarships. But four years into the campaign, we dropped from No. 32 to No. 38.
The methodology changed again in 2023, when we dropped from 41st to 53rd. Despite For the Bold raising $303 million for the top priority of scholarships at one of the most expensive public schools in the country — still accounting for not even a third of the $1 billion, in the end — it didn’t raise our standing. And all the progress made toward increasing alumni participation (to 30%, the highest of any public university at the time) didn’t count anymore. One Tribe, One Day, zero points awarded.
It’s largely nonsense
Now’s a good time to explain why rankings are flawed. Just a few weeks ago, the Atlantic took a look at the history and controversy surrounding college rankings. It’s worth a read, if there aren’t already enough lengthy things to read in your life.
Any list with multiple five- or six-way ties is sensitive to minor changes in the data. And our apple doesn’t look much like all the other apples. Our No. 51 spot in the 2025 rankings is shared with Florida State, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, Wake Forest and Case Western. Aside from the ampersand and our esteemed chancellor, W&M and A&M don’t have a whole lot in common, yet here they are, ranked identically. Any high-school kid choosing a school would be forgiven for turning to TikTok and AI instead.
However, rankings are not meaningless2. They come from self-reported data, indexed with peer reputation surveys to create the final number. USNWR details their current methodology here; W&M’s take is that they suddenly discounted small class sizes, high school class rank and alumni engagement: all historic and valuable strengths of the College. They did.
The new factors — social mobility, borrower debt and volume of faculty research — favored big public universities with broader access to Pell Grant recipients and substantial research portfolios. On the flip side, W&M continued, “smaller and mid-sized universities like ours … generally experienced declines.” Perhaps coincidentally, W&M no longer claims to be even a “liberal arts and sciences university” — now we say “public research university”3 first.
But the single greatest factor in the ranks comes from peer assessment (20%): their attempt to evaluate a school’s reputation. In 2014, the last time W&M still publicly called itself “The College of William & Mary,” we were No. 32. We’ve never been higher since.
“Leading with values that endure”
The William & Mary administration knows our falling rank is a problem. The president has convened a task force to look into rankings while defining and pursuing “preeminence:” the Brafferton buzzword of the moment.
But you’d never find this year’s rankings in W&M News if you were looking for them; before that article even mentions U.S. News, it touts at least six older news items first and tries to distract you with talk of “momentum.” It’s bad news they tried to bury.
This makes a sad kind of sense in the context of the greater W&M identity crisis. The demographic cliff is coming and not every university will survive. Prestige and reputation are more valuable than ever, and we do not fit neatly into the usual boxes. There is pressure to look more like the larger public research universities that have leapfrogged us, so we can regain some lost ground. For an institution as old, beloved and special as William & Mary, that kind of conformity would be tragic.
Let’s make sure they don’t forget what makes us special.
- *Historical U.S. News rankings data comes from Andrew Reiter’s excellent website and resources. ↩︎
- We use U.S. News rankings here as a third-party proxy for broader questions about quality and parity, but we recognize they are not perfect, as no single measure can be. ↩︎
- Like on the main www.wm.edu homepage. ↩︎
