What College Rankings Are Missing

Inscribed upon the exterior of Harvard Yard’s Dexter Gate are the words, “Enter to grow in wisdom,” while the gate’s interior admonishes those leaving: “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.”

Such aspirations are evident in the mission statements of many colleges and universities across the country. The mission of Harvard College is “to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.” Swarthmore College describes part of its mission as “provid[ing]... a transformative liberal arts education... and empower[ing] all who share in our community to flourish and contribute to a better world.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison aspires towards “creating a welcoming, empowered, and inclusive community; and preparing current and future generations to live satisfying, useful, and ethical lives.”

These are beautiful aspirations, which our institutions of higher learning are right to strive for. Nonetheless, our evaluations and rankings of colleges and universities frequently neglect these matters.

For example, the U.S. News and World Report lists the following as factors receiving at least a 5 percent weight in its annual rankings of colleges and universities: graduation rates, retention rates, graduation rate performance, borrower debt, earnings, peer assessment, faculty salaries, financial resources per student, and standardized tests. These things are undoubtedly important. However, such rankings seem to entirely miss the broader matters of wisdom, leadership, integrity, or indeed overall flourishing. If colleges and universities aspire to form students for public-spirited flourishing lives, then surely it would be worth knowing whether their students think they are succeeding.

Of course, evaluating students in terms of their wisdom or leadership is no simple matter. A more straightforward approach is to assess how students perceive university life as contributing, or not, to these pursuits. For instance, the Wall Street Journal incorporated questions related to students’ character into its 2025 rankings of U.S. Colleges and Universities. While these questions received only 4 percent of the weight in the resulting ranking, they still signify a beginning.

Four of these six questions that we helped develop specifically concern whether students perceive their institution as having contributed to their character development and their capacity for leadership and citizenship (central to Harvard College’s mission, and its gates). The four questions, self-rated from zero (“Has not helped”) to 10 (“Has helped a lot)” concern the University’s assistance in helping students become wiser, more just, more equipped to “positively change the world,” and “develop character strengths” that contribute to societal change.

These questions are part of an assessment of a broader Academic Flourishing Initiative that we at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University have begun using in campus-wide initiatives, ranging from assessments of individual and community flourishing, to student formation questions about the institution’s contributions to student knowledge, critical thinking, meaning in life, relationships, capacity to work across differences, honesty, and courage, among others. One might thus quantify how students perceive their institution contributing to their own growth in wisdom, or justice, or leadership, or citizenship.

In a chart we have prepared, one can take a glance at how students at the 429 institutions providing at least 50 respondents each see their college’s contributions. Harvard falls about in the middle of the pack for average scores on these four questions. While this is a far cry from Harvard’s dominant place in conventional rankings of colleges, it is nonetheless considerably better than we do in the Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression’s annual free speech rankings. The two issues — student formation and academic freedom — are also closely linked. As we have argued at length elsewhere, virtues such as patience, courage, justice, and humility are not only important in their own right, but are also crucial for achieving the University’s primary academic goals of education and research. Without courage, students will struggle to express controversial views in or out of class, while without patience, justice, or humility, they will struggle to give those they disagree with a fair and impartial hearing.

Some qualifications are in order. The relative ordering of schools is different across the four questions: different institutions have different strengths and weaknesses. Also, despite weighting by gender, race, and year, the samples are not necessarily representative. All of the data is, moreover, self-reported, though the fact that it is a self-report of perceptions of a university’s contribution arguably renders this more reliable than would be assessments of one’s own character. It might also be easier for certain institutions, for example religious institutions with a shared vision, to have their students feel that college life is contributing in these ways, since each such institution may be comparatively more homogeneous than its secular counterparts. Institutions embracing a plurality of different perspectives may be rightly more reticent in proposing a shared vision of the good life. It might thus be reasonable to analyze religious and secular institutions separately, and in the table below we accordingly report separately on some of the highest weighted means of perceptions concerning growth in wisdom.

Such data are meant to supplement, not supplant, more traditional metrics based on graduation rates, subsequent earnings, and standardized tests. Those more material aspects of academic and professional life undoubtedly matter for decisions about where to apply or attend. But so do growth in wisdom, justice, and citizenship. Different students (and parents) may be seeking different things in their pursuit of higher education. Such data can also help university leaders, administrators, and faculty in decision-making about programs and curricula. If our institutions of higher learning are truly committed to realizing their mission statements, it makes sense for them to collect data on whether they are succeeding.

What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, what we aim for, and the policies put in place to achieve those aims. Our institutions of higher education have noble missions and visions. Let us take them seriously. Let us grow in wisdom.

Tyler J. VanderWeele is the John H. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Brendan W. Case is the Associate Director for Research at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. They are members of the Council of Academic Freedom at Harvard.