College Rankings Influence Parents More than Students, Illinois Wesleyan Surveys Show

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — College students and parents may not see eye to eye on everything, but separate surveys of Illinois Wesleyan University first-year students and their parents do agree that college rankings have a greater influence on the parents than on the students.

The college rankings season reaches its peak this month with the release of publications such as U.S. News & World-Report and The Best 345 Colleges from The Princeton Review, both of which include various kinds of rankings. According to both of the Illinois Wesleyan surveys, parents are more apt to give credence to such ratings.

When the parents were asked how much weight they gave various rankings, 68% said a lot, 32% said a little, and no one said none. Students responded to the same question with quite different opinions: 15% said that they gave a lot of weight to the rankings, 71% said a little, and 14% said none.

On the parent survey, 81% of the respondents said that they, the parents, gave more weight to the rankings than their students did. The student survey mirrored that result, with 63% of students saying that they paid less attention to the rankings than did their parents.

In addition, both the parents and students pointed to the campus visit as the No. 1 factor in their college decision. One thing that they did not necessarily agree about was how much influence friends have on a prospective student’s college decision. Parents rated "friends" seventh on the list of possible influences while the students said that friends represented the third highest influence — just ahead of parents.

Asked about their use of popular printed college guidebooks, 63% of the Illinois Wesleyan students indicated that they had consulted the guidebooks. By comparison, the World Wide Web was used by 90% of the respondents who rated the Web sixth on the list of most important influences.

As for the specific college guidebooks that the students use, U.S. News & World-Report’s America’s Best Colleges was ranked as the most useful followed by The Best 331 Colleges from The Princeton Review and The College Handbook from The College Board.