Think back to the time you spent researching potential colleges to attend. If you’re like many students, you spent a large portion of this time looking at college rankings on school websites or the U.S. News and World Report. These figures play a large role in how schools market themselves, and Furman is no exception. From our school’s website to articles in Furman News to banners around campus, Furman boasts a number of impressive rankings, like 45th best national liberal arts college (a spot up from last year), 22nd best first-year experience, and seventh most innovative.

Rankings help schools stand out to prospective students, faculty and donors alike. However, such lists have faced criticism for failing to weigh crucial criteria appropriately and lacking precision. While it goes without saying that numbers alone are not a perfect metric of success, it is worth taking a closer look at what is considered in these lists and, more crucially, what isn’t. Using rankings strategically allows schools to market specific attributes to students and donors, which places emphasis on novel initiatives without due consideration of their effectiveness or economic viability.

In 2025, the U.S. News and World Report ranked Furman against 210 other national liberal arts colleges. In light of this number, 45th overall is impressive, and in most sub-categories, we also placed well within the top half. Overall rankings consider many objective factors like graduation rate and student-to-faculty ratio, but they also utilize surveys from college officials and academics across the country. Former Reed College president Colin Diver, a respondent to one of these surveys, criticized the way they are structured in a 2005 op-ed for The Atlantic.

“I’m asked to rank some 220 liberal arts schools nationwide into five tiers of quality… most of what I may think I know about the others is based on badly outdated information, fragmentary impressions, or the relative place of a school.”

For example, the list of most innovative schools — our best category — is determined solely by a survey of university employees. Respondents were asked to list innovative schools in no particular order, and an impressive proportion evidently listed Furman. To use President Diver’s words, what “fragmentary impressions” could have led to this?

Pathways, our nationally awarded advising program, may have stood out to these respondents, but do they know enough about the benefits and drawbacks of this program? Though Pathways has many benefits for new students, it also uses financial resources. CliftonStrengths, for example, charges for every student who takes the assessment as part of their Pathways class. It places a significant time burden on students and the faculty who teach the class, and it has received large amounts of negative feedback from students. These costs don’t automatically discredit Pathways or other innovative initiatives at Furman, but national recognition isn’t necessarily tied to the impact of these programs on campus.

The area where Furman performs worst is “Performers on Social Mobility,” which compares the graduation rate of Pell Grant recipients to that of students who are not Pell Grant recipients. In this area, we were 158th. Furman, like all schools, tends to advertise the areas we excel in. However, if rankings become paramount to how schools are evaluated, there’s not much incentive to improve in areas where we are lacking.

As Furman advertises and evaluates itself going forward, we students should look beyond the numbers we see in the brochures. If our tuition money is to be spent on Pathways and CliftonStrengths experts, awards for innovation aren’t sufficient. Furman should be able to clearly substantiate the benefits of Pathways and any other initiatives if we are expected to continue paying for them. 

Additionally, our school’s comparatively low performance in addressing economic inequality may often be overlooked in light of our other strengths. While ensuring equitable outcomes may not accrue the same national recognition as other efforts, we should acknowledge this shortcoming in our institution and insist that Furman becomes more equitable for economically disadvantaged students. With Furman’s growing cost of attendance and student concern about employee compensation, we should demand that the changes we see on campus are more than skin deep.