Intelligent.com ranked Oregon State University’s College of Business as having the best offering of online undergraduate business degrees for 2022.
This story originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed on October 2. To read the full article, click here.
The latest celebrations of college rankings results arrived in journalists’ inboxes like a deluge.
Every institution seemed to have something positive to share in a string of self-congratulatory press releases touting their success in this year’s annual U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, released last week. Even some colleges that plunged in the latest rankings bragged about their outcomes. And while picking and choosing selling points is a time-honored marketing strategy, the approach draws added scrutiny at a time when public trust in higher ed is already at a low.
To take one example of rankings spin, New College of Florida has plunged 74 spots in the U.S. News rankings since Governor Ron DeSantis began a conservative overhaul of the institution in 2023. Before the takeover, NCF ranked 76th among national liberal arts colleges; this year it came in at 150th.
But despite falling 15 spots since last year, New College touted improvement across several metrics this year: financial resources per student, academic profile of the incoming class and full-time faculty. The news release—which included its performance in other rankings schemes where it improved—did not mention the overall U.S. News ranking or how the institution performed compared to prior years.
“Last year I said we were determined to earn top rankings across multiple national publications,” New College President Richard Corcoran said in the release. “These metrics prove the positive outcomes New College is creating. It also comes at a moment when families are asking a fair question about whether a degree is still worth the investment. Our answer is that the content of the four years matters. A student who writes a thesis, who is known by name by full-time faculty, and who has taken responsibility for their own education under an academic contract is not interchangeable with their transcript. Three independent rankings now say we are building that.”
But some New College alumni aren’t buying it.
William Rosenberg, president of Novo Collegian Alliance, an alumni group that has pushed back on the conservative overhaul, accused Corcoran of “cherry-picking” the rankings outcomes.
“For the million-dollar compensation package Corcoran is receiving, Florida’s taxpayers are entitled to honesty, not window dressing,” Rosenberg said in a news release last week.
Asked about the criticism and NCF’s fall in the U.S. News rankings since 2023, college spokesperson James Miller emailed Inside Higher Ed a statement that echoed last week’s news release and highlighted the same metrics. Miller also pointed to the negative impact of peer assessment, which U.S. News gathers and incorporates into its rankings methodology. Peer-assessment scores—long a topic of debate—make up 20 percent of the rankings.
“U.S. News is the only one of these rankings that incorporates subjective peer assessment into its methodology, and many Florida and Southeastern institutions ranked lower this year as a result,” he wrote. “By every objective measure, New College is getting stronger and better.”
New College isn’t the only Florida institution celebrating after a rankings decline. The State University System of Florida released a statement last week trumpeting its “upward trajectory,” even though most of its 12 member institutions fell in this year’s U.S. News rankings. Like New College, the state system pointed to its performance across multiple national rankings, a break from last year, when it issued a news release that only focused on U.S. News outcomes.
System officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.
