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With the recent release of the 2026 U.S. News and World Report’s College Rankings, the conversation surrounding Pepperdine’s fall from the top 50 has reemerged. For those uninitiated freshmen, now is the time of year when all the upperclassmen remind each other that we were admitted when the ranking was high and the admission rate was low, as we allow a national publication to unilaterally dictate what we think we’re getting out of our education.
However, every student I talk to seems to have no idea what criteria U.S. News uses; we all seem to accept this ranking as the single determinant of whether or not future employers will look at our degree and call it worthwhile or not, without stopping to consider how they’re getting these numbers.
For those content to complain about the rankings without understanding them, feel free to stop reading and save yourself some time. I, however, had homework I wanted to avoid, so I spent a solid couple hours googling every variation of “Pepperdine,” “U.S. News” and “college ranking criteria” I could think of.
First important reminder: U.S. News allows for ties in the rankings, according to the 2026 U.S. News and World Report’s College Rankings. So, while it seems like we fell four spots below last year, and four more from the year before, we’ve really dropped two ‘levels’ — from a tie at #76 between multiple schools, to a tie at #80 between multiple schools, to a four-way tie at #84 this year. There isn’t some drastic drop in quality, just minor changes that bump between different groups.
Second important reminder: U.S. News changed their ranking criteria a few years ago, starting with the 2023-2024 ranking. This correlated to Pepperdine’s drop from #55 to #76. Since then, given tied rankings, Pepperdine’s rank has stayed relatively stable.
This crazy shift speaks more to the arbitrary nature of rankings than any actual quality changes on Pepperdine’s part; slight changes to evaluation standards resulted in fluctuations for many schools — Pepperdine Newsroom even mentioned other schools when writing about this ranking shift. But maybe this criteria is more fitting of what we should all be looking for in our college and our administration should be working to improve in the newly-valued metrics; so what is U.S. News grading colleges on?
Some of the criteria U.S. News ranks on makes perfect sense: graduation rate, first-year retention rate, which is how many students return vs. transfer to other schools and borrower debt, which is how much we’re all taking out in student loans and college grads earning more than high school grads. Side note: neither acceptance rate nor yield rate factor into the ranking at all, so no need to get ruffled feathers about our admission rate being over 50%!
Other criteria are less straightforward — “peer assessment” constitutes 20% of the school’s overall ranking, and a total of 15.5% is dedicated to “graduation rate performance,” split between all students (10%) and Pell grant recipients (5.5%). So naturally, I went down a rabbit hole.
Graduation rate performance is a four-year rolling average that compares a university’s graduation rate to what U.S. News predicted it would be. Their prediction is formed from a statistical model that inputs the freshmen class’ SAT/ACT scores, their high school class ranking, percentage of Pell Grant recipients, spending per student and number of STEM degrees awarded — because I guess my Biology degree is just incomprehensibly harder than everyone else’s in a statistically significant way.
In some ways, this feels like double-counting the same factors they separately rank: standardized test scores, Pell Grant recipients and spending per student each have their own category. Why develop a separate, over-complicated way of including those factors in the evaluation of a college again? Additionally, Pell Grant graduation performance compares the graduation rate of Pell recipients to the graduation rate of the whole student body, which once again accounts for the graduation rate twice in this convoluted ranking system.
Peer assessments, too, seem reductive in execution. U.S. News bases 20% of a school’s ranking off of a survey that they send out to “top administrators at other institutions” — top administrators being presidents, provosts, deans of admission, etc., and other institutions being ‘all’ other national universities — said survey simply asks each participant to rank other universities on a scale from 1-5 on “overall academic quality,” according to the U.S. News and World Report. That’s it.
In this “Do you like me? Check yes or no” of a ranking criteria, only 30.8% of the 4,591 officials who were sent the survey responded. For those who haven’t taken a math class in four years (I support you), that’s a grand total of 1,414 (.028 — poor 0.028 of a person, whoever that was) people deciding 20% of every single college’s ranking on the list. In fact, this response rate is down from last year’s 39%, about a 21% decrease — yes, that is how the math works, you’re just going to have to trust me on this.
Beyond my confusion with about 35% of the ranking scores, some of the data U.S. News uses are from years before any of us even started attending Pepperdine. Borrower debt, constituting 5% of the score, is calculated with data from 2019–2021.
One could argue that this artificially boosts Pepperdine’s stats, given recent tuition hikes that likely increased current students’ loans, but either way it’s making this ranking criteria inaccurate. For the category of college students outearning high school graduates, another 5%, their data is from 2019–2020.
However, this data is from alumni who graduated five years prior, or the class of 2015. Data on financial resources per student, 8% of the overall ranking, is taken from 2022-2023, according to the U.S. News and World Report.
This led me to another question: what exactly is included in financial expenditures on students? U.S. News defines this category as evaluating an institution’s “total expenditures on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services and institutional support…only ‘functional’ spending that can be associated with academics is included, while other spending such as housing and athletics is excluded.”
Yet again, we’ve reached some vague categorization for which U.S. News has not, to my knowledge, released the behind-the-scenes of. As such, everything that follows on this topic are my assumptions of how certain expenditures are classified.
That being said, I do love assuming things, so here goes: many of Pepperdine’s major expenditures in recent years — acquiring the Chateau d’Hauteville, construction on the Mountain and any costs associated with starting up the Kyoto program — are unlikely to be classified as functional spending by U.S. News, at least in majority.
The Chateau is primarily housing, and the Mountain seems to primarily be a stadium, so that would qualify it under athletics. Depending on how U.S. News is getting their information, they’re not classifying these things — which do/will improve student academic experience here — as the kind of spending that would boost our ranking.
By their classification, much of Pepperdine’s abroad expenditures — upkeep of the houses in London, Heidelberg, Florence and D.C. plus the payments to homestays in Buenos Aires — likely fall under the disqualified “housing” category. Pepperdine does spend $10.6 million yearly on research, according to Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, so this category likely isn’t something singlehandedly tanking our rating anyway, but it raises an important reminder: rankings aren’t everything.
Yes, I know, it’s cliche and exactly what someone whose school is no longer in the top 50 would say, but it’s also true — even if you don’t believe it when your professors tell you that grades don’t define you. Ask yourself an honest question: did you come to Pepperdine because it was in the top 50? Because I’ll tell you right now, if that’s the only reason you came, you could’ve picked at least 49 other colleges — and realistically more, considering multiple schools tie for #50.
When I ask people why they came here, I usually get one of four answers (in no particular order): the abroad programs, the beach, the faith-based education or the small class/school size. Apart from student-faculty ratio — ours is 12:1, within the range of ratios of top 30 universities — none of these factors are included in our ranking — though they should be, we have to be at least top 5 for beach. The things we came here for, that we love the most about this school, do not relate to what U.S. News thinks is important.
Please don’t misinterpret this whole spiel as me trying to say that actually, our university is #1 in our hearts and there is no way to improve anything here at all. Obviously, we’re not an Ivy League school. But to stake Pepperdine’s value, and by extension the value of the time you’ve dedicated to earning your degree here, on a single list that I’m 90% sure no employer is looking twice at, feels a little reductive and absurd.
If you’ve studied on the beach on the weekends, skipped your surf class some weeks because “the ocean will still be there tomorrow,” had dinner or Bible study at your professor’s house with the rest of your classmates, studied abroad in an actual castle, or (in my case) gotten to do research with the Dean of Seaver College as a random undergraduate student because he still runs a lab while doing…whatever it is deans do…then you’ve appreciated something about Pepperdine that being able to say “I go to a top 50 college” doesn’t come close to accounting for.
And hey, if after all that you still want something to complain about, I don’t hear anyone talking about The Wall Street Journal’s list — on there, we’re #145.
Allison Lincicome (’26)
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Contact Allison Lincicome via email: allison.lincicome@pepperdine.edu
