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Research has suggested that changes in rankings have an impact on admissions outcomes at colleges and universities. This study incorporates organization theory to explain these mechanisms and other external forces driving the pursuit of prestige in higher education. Beyond updating and replicating previous findings related to the impact of college rankings on admissions outcomes, U.S. News & World Report and IPEDS data from 2001 through 2010 are used to describe the low variability of prestige among the top 50 institutions, show that an increase in an institution's ranking has a negative effect on the enrollment figures of first-year African-American students, and examine a possible "threshold effect" associated with greater changes in admissions outcomes for institutions joining an elite peer group, such as the top 10, top 25, or top 50.
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The survival and preservation of a higher education institution has become inextricably linked with the publics perception of its quality. Despite widespread criticism of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings (Guinier and Strum 2001; Hunter 1993; McGuire 1993; Schmitz 1993), the annual "best colleges" guide serves as the most recognized assessment of the performance of higher education institutions. U.S. News & World Report has published college rankings since 1983 and averages roughly 13 million page views on its website when new rankings are released (Diamond 2012). Often, prospective students across the world rely on these rankings when deciding where to apply and enroll for their postsecondary education. For colleges and universities, a more favorable ranking represents the perception of higher quality students and greater institutional prestige. Although many higher education leaders publicly criticize rankings of academic quality, such rankings nevertheless have a strong influence on organizational decision making (Espeland and Saudcr 2007) as institutions frequently monitor rankings criteria in their pursuit of improved status and legitimacy (Bowman and Bastedo 2009).
This study examines ten years of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings in order to investigate the extent to which institutions' pursuit of prestige affects their selectivity and student quality. Changes in ranking have been found to affect higher education institutions' admissions outcomes and prospective students' enrollment decisions (Bowman and Bastedo 2009; Monks and Ehrenberg 1999). Although previous findings have indicated that colleges and universities typically change...