Â鶹ÊÓƵ Rejoins U.S. News & World Report Rankings
In 2023, CC made a decision to withdraw from the U.S. News & World Report annual college rankings based on the best information available at the time. Since then, USNWR updated their methodology, creating a metric that better aligns with CC’s values. Now, we are rejoining the rankings and base our strategic decision on three main factors: access and opportunity, visibility and recognition, and talent attraction and retention. Interim President Manya Whitaker explains the decision in her 2025 announcement.
Dear CC Community,
To ensure Â鶹ÊÓƵ thrives for the next 150 years, we must make strategic choices that strengthen our institution and advance both our immediate and long-term priorities. After careful consideration and community input, I am writing to share that CC will reenter the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings this spring.
This decision reflects the realities of today’s higher education landscape and is guided by three key factors:
- Visibility and Recognition — Rankings like those in USNWR amplify the impact of a CC education, reinforcing what our alumni and community already know: CC produces engaged, forward-thinking leaders. Our strong outcomes, including high graduation rates, competitive post-graduate employment, and top-tier faculty engagement, deserve recognition on a national stage and help us fulfill our mission.
- Access and Opportunity — Many prospective students and families — especially those without extensive social and cultural capital to inform their decision— rely on rankings to navigate the college search process. Rejoining the USNWR rankings ensures that more students from diverse backgrounds can discover CC, aligning with our commitment to expanding educational access.
- Talent Attraction and Retention — Faculty and staff consider rankings when evaluating potential employers. By reentering the USNWR rankings, we enhance our ability to recruit and retain exceptional teacher-scholars and dedicated staff who are drawn to institutions recognized for academic excellence, student success, and innovation.
A hallmark of the liberal arts is cognitive flexibility — the capacity to adapt one’s thinking in response to new information and evolving circumstances. We made our initial decision to withdraw from USNWR rankings in 2023 based on the best information available at the time. Now, with greater insight into how prospective students, families, faculty, and staff use and value this data, it is clear that rejoining serves the best interests of CC and our future.
We will continue to make thoughtful, mission-driven decisions that uphold our values, serve our students, and secure the long-term strength of Â鶹ÊÓƵ.
Sincerely,
Manya Whitaker
Interim President
Why did CC withdraw from the USNWR rankings in 2023?
To learn more about CC’s decision to stop participating with USNWR rankings, you can listen to former President L. Song Richardson’s reasoning from 2023.
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A Message from the President
Dear CC Community:
I joined this remarkable community at Â鶹ÊÓƵ 19 months ago because we have a long history of thinking differently and accomplishing what other schools cannot. We provide the finest liberal arts education anywhere in order to ignite our students’ passions and potential so they can help to create a more just world.
At CC, we aren’t afraid to take courageous actions to support our vision and mission. We were the first higher educational institution to implement the Block Plan (1970), the first to implement an Antiracism Commitment (2018), and the first institution in the Rocky Mountain region (and the eighth in North America) to achieve carbon neutrality (2020). None of this was easy, but we don’t settle for easy at CC.
Today, I’m proud to announce that we will once again be at the forefront of taking bold and courageous action in service of our mission, vision, and values. After extensive deliberations and surveys of our students, staff, faculty, alumni, and parents, the sentiment of our community is clear. Â鶹ÊÓƵ will no longer cooperate in the deeply flawed U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” ranking.
We are pulling out of this ranking because it privileges criteria that are antithetical to our values and our aspirational goals. Here are a few examples.
- U.S. News’ flawed methodology still equates academic quality with institutional wealth and continues to rely heavily on the infamous questionnaire asking institutions to rank each other’s reputation, a non-objective process subject to gaming.
- It continues to equate academic rigor with high school rank and standardized test scores, a metric that creates perverse incentives for schools to provide “merit” aid at the expense of need-based aid. This metric is also inconsistent with our belief that the educational experiences we provide transform our students regardless of these class rank and test scores, which is why we went test-optional in 2019.
- Further, U.S. News & World Report’s methodology, weighing the proportion of students with debt and the total amount of debt at graduation, creates incentives for schools to admit wealthy students who can attend without incurring debt. We cannot reconcile our values and our aspirations with these metrics or the behaviors they motivate.
We are making this move despite having benefited from these rankings. We are a prestigious, highly selective, private liberal arts college. Over the past decade, we have been ranked consistently between 25 and 29. Additionally, our peers consistently rank us as the second or third most innovative school. We expect that we will drop in the rankings based on our decision to leave the U.S. News & World Report rankings. If this occurs, it will not be because our educational quality has changed, but because U.S. News & World Report will continue to rank us using incomplete data.
At CC, we pride ourselves on the immersive educational experiences we provide through the Block Plan; our small class sizes; our commitments to antiracism, sustainability, and wellness; and our willingness to take bold actions and have courageous conversations. We will continue to attract a diverse group of students who will choose us because of the unique educational experiences we offer at Â鶹ÊÓƵ, irrespective of how a third-party judges that experience. These are students who want to learn in a highly immersive curriculum, who want deep, authentic collaboration in small learning communities, and who want to participate as partners in the learning process with peers and professors alike through our highly innovative Block Plan.
We will no longer perpetuate and be complicit with a system that encourages applicants to evaluate schools based on a biased ranking using opaque criteria that are associated with wealth and privilege. Rather, we want prospective students to choose us based on criteria that the rankings do not measure: analytical reasoning, creative problem-solving, critical thinking, comfort with failure and ambiguity, making meaning of the world and one’s place in it, exploring new ideas, and fostering creativity and innovation.
Â鶹ÊÓƵ has and will continue to share dashboards on our website with metrics that we consider important, such as graduation and retention rates, diversity, and post-graduate success, so that prospective students and their families can make decisions about whether CC is right for them.
Moving forward, we will focus our efforts on becoming a leader in educational access, opportunity, social mobility, and student transformation. Taking the courageous step away from U.S. News & World Report is part and parcel of leaning into our values, vision, and mission; acting with integrity; and operating consistently with our aspirations for the future of CC. I hope that other courageous liberal arts colleges will join us.
Sincerely,
L. Song Richardson
President