Template talk:Infobox US university ranking

Times Higher Education/WSJ Ranking Template Not Working

Hey, I'm having some trouble with the parameter "THE_WSJ" on a US university ranking Infobox. Is anyone else having this issue? Thanks and please let me know!Pdyusmep (talk) 16:22, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't appear to be a parameter for this template; it's just incorrectly listed in the documentation as one. ElKevbo (talk) 16:32, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

It's not a known parameter, but was added by an IP a year ago to the documentation page. If it is notable enough (provide proof), then we can add it. Corky ^{Buzz by the Hornet's Nest} 17:30, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

It is difficult to "prove" that any ranking is "notable". For example, ARWU isn't cited widely (in the media, etc) as a "notable" national ranking in any sense - it's widely acclaimed as a top international ranking. That being said, ARWU is a parameter in the template for national universities in the United States. Assessing the notability of a ranking is going to be, for the most part, an ambiguous and subjective assessment to make. However, if I were to make a case for the THE US college ranking, it would be that the ranking is published by what is recognized as one of the world's most important education publications. Do note that the THE US college rankings have a devoted section on the Ranking of universities in the United States article already. THE World University Ranking is a gold standard among rankings as noted on the ARWU and QS pages. Here is a secondary source that states THE is one of the world's most prominent ranking sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20101003203348/http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/schools%2Balways%2Bmarks/3560240/story.html. Again, here: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/11/state-rankings. If this doesn't suffice I suggest you give me a more specific criteria/check-list for establishing what a "notable" ranking is. Pdyusmep (talk) 13:07, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pdyusmep: That is all I asked for, thank you. Basically, I wanted to make sure there is enough to prove its notability so that we're not fighting with others down the road. Which section do you want it in: "U.S." or "Global"? Corky ^{Buzz by the Hornet's Nest} 13:48, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

@Corkythehornetfan: Great, thank you for your help with this. It should be in U.S. - I have no preference for what the parameter should be called, but something along the lines of "THE_US" or "THES_WSJ". Sincerely Pdyusmep (talk) 14:10, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

It's been added. Use |THE_WSJ =. Thanks, Corky ^{Buzz by the Hornet's Nest} 14:20, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

@Corkythehornetfan: No rush, but it seems the parameter isn't being recognized as of yet. I checked the testcase page and it doesn't seem to be appearing there either. There's no emergency to fix it now, but just wanted to keep you updated. Pdyusmep (talk) 14:48, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pdyusmep: Sorry, I was on my tablet and didn't really look into it. It should (I hope!) be fixed now. Corky ^{Buzz by the Hornet's Nest} 15:41, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

@Corkythehornetfan: Working perfectly now. Thanks a lot. Pdyusmep (talk) 15:51, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

SCIMAGO ranking

Can you please add two more parameters: College_and_university_rankings#SCImago_Institutions_Rankings and Webometrics_Ranking_of_World_Universities? Both rankings are easily retrievable form the websites below maintained by the Spanish National Research Council:

http://www.scimagoir.com/

http://www.webometrics.info/en

Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.98.78.51 (talk) 15:41, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

ARWU does not create national rankings - ARWU national needs removal - ARWU is properly presented in the global rankings

The ARWU is a global ranking. They have never created US rankings. This national ranking needs to be removed. Similarly, there are no QS national rankings. ARWU is properly presented in the global rankings section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikecurry1 (talk • contribs) 15:22, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

I request the template editors delete this line. "| ARWU_NU = "

The ARWU has never created a US national rankings. Just as the QS does not create US national rankings. Why are one of these two global rankings being chosen to be placed in the national rankings section and not the other? Neither were designed as a national ranking and they should both not be in the national rankings, not simply choosing one of the two to put there. The proper place for both of these global rankings is in the global rankings section alone. ARWU_National should be removed. Mikecurry1 (talk) 15:49, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Some related discussion at Template talk:Infobox US university ranking/Archive 1#ARWU_NU to ARWU_N. I think this should be discussed further as it has been in the template for many years and it is likely to be in use on articles. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:07, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Good point. Mikecurry1 (talk) 21:38, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Request disabled for now — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:50, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

It has been several years, and there has been no change. Wiki should not refactor only the ARWU ranking and not the others, THE or QS in the national rankings too. I am going to remove it, as Wiki is against refactoring rankings.Mikecurry1 (talk) 16:32, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

References outdated

The references given in the infobox US university ranking - concerning the global universities rankings - are pretty outdated:

• ARWU Shanghai Ranking: shown is 2017, but current one is for a long time that of 2018: http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2018.html
• QS World University Rankings: shown is 2018, but current one is 2019: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2019
• THE World University Rankings: shown is 2016, but current one is that of 2019: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats
• USNWR Best Global Universities Rankings: shown is 2017, but the current one is that of 2018: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings

Could this be corrected? Regards, Mr. D. E. Mophon (talk) 09:20, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, the sources were several years out of date. I have updated them all. Randomeditor1000 (talk) 19:26, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

@Mr. D. E. Mophon and Randomeditor1000: based on the above, shouldn't the references be removed from the template and provided by the article calling the template. Just updating the references in the templates implies that all the template values match the new reference... See how Template:Infobox world university ranking has parmas for the references. --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing})

Zackmann, the world ranking template was created after the Infobox US University ranking. My recollection was that a deliberate choice was made to include the same general reference for the US ranking infobox due to the shear number of edits needed to update the information. The actual ranking numbers do still have to be manually entered in the infobox for each article. It would be nice if we had a script for this that could parse the information automatically. I am going to list this discussion in WT:UNI and see if we can't generate some more discussion on what to do. Randomeditor1000 (talk) 15:03, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

It seems like this information should be either (a) added and updated by a bot on an annual basis or (b) added to WikiData (where it would also be added and updated on an annual basis). Either option would require gathering and (at least temporarily) storing a large chunk of this proprietary ranking data in our own database; I don't know about any potential legal issues this may raise. ElKevbo (talk) 16:54, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

@Randomeditor1000 and ElKevbo: let me know how I can be helpful. Again not saying that the references shouldn't be there, I just feel they belong on the data side. When you consider the access date... If the template is used on 100 pages and I update 2 of them with newer data, that means that the access dates are in accurate for the other 98... IMHO, provide the refs from the page calling the template and provide a date as well. I.E. These rankings are current as of <Some date>. Food for thought. --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 19:15, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm not technically knowledgeable to accomplish what ElKevbo has proposed. Plus there is the issue of can we store this here? Maybe we could ask a third party to store the information in a database for us? Randomeditor1000 (talk) 14:00, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Adding University Ranking Categories

Is it possible to add all university ranking categories as identified on the College and University Rankings page for North America? Given that the other rankings identified in that article seem to have established notability, it seems appropriate to expand this template to include those rankings as optional parameters. Cc09091986 (talk) 13:21, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Can you please be more specific about which ranking systems you would like added? There are a lot of systems listed in that article that don't appear to be notable or at least don't currently have an article. ElKevbo (talk) 17:13, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Add Niche Ranking

the Niche national colleges ranking should be added into the template, considering that it is widely used among both parents and students. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.3.43.45 (talk) 03:34, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Add link to infobox

I think that the "National" header should link to Rankings of universities in the United States ParadiseDesertOasis8888 (talk) 04:27, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Specify region

For regional universities, I think it makes sense to specify what region USNWR categorizes it as in. E.g. for Hunter College is in the North region. Therefore, the header bar that says Regional would render as Regional—North or Regional: North. Ergo Sum 19:24, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Add Times Higher Education Liberal Arts Ranking

A parameter for Times Higher Education Liberal Arts rankings should be added Obiwankablowme (talk) 15:58, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

 Not done for now: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit template-protected}} template. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:43, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Add QS US National Ranking

QS World University Rankings has just released its US university rankings for the first time. (https://www.topuniversities.com/where-to-study/north-america/united-states/ranked-top-100-us-universities) Considering that both U.S. News National & Global Rankings are in the template, I think it would be fair to add this as well.

Chervolina (talk) 19:39, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, since QS actually ranks the top 300, not just the 100 (https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/usa-rankings/2020), which is more meaningful. Contributor321 (talk) 20:47, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

What criteria should be applied to evaluate this request? I hope that it's not just "this ranking exists and a couple of Wikipedia editors think it's okay." (Yes, I realize that we haven't firmly confronted this issue and it could raise uncomfortable questions about other rankings already in the template and others that are not. We have to start somewhere, right?) ElKevbo (talk) 21:04, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

That's hard to answer (as everything's so subjective when it comes to rankings), but I think two factors can be considered. First, QS is one of the most widely cited university rankings in the world along with ARWU and Times. Second, they are very clear about their criteria: Employability (27%), Research (26%), Diversity & Internationalization (25%), and Learning Experience (22%). I think this would be a good list to measure the American universities' international reputations, as QS weights it more heavily than others. Chervolina (talk) 06:12, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

What expert commentary and analysis is available about this ranking system? ElKevbo (talk) 22:15, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Adding the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) to the university ranking list

Would it be reasonable to add the CWUR ranking to the list of global university rankings ? CWUR is mentioned in various university websites (MIT, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, UIUC, etc.). The CWUR website contains relevant information regarding the organization itself (i.e. the origins of the project, the organization's heardquarters etc.) as well as a detailed section dealing with the ranking's methodology. It is noteworthy that their website includes a detailed technical paper entitled "a quantitative approach to world university rankings" that deals with the latter methodology. I believe it would be reasonable to add it to the university ranking list, especially given that it's one of the few rankings (if not the only one) that do not rely on conventional surveys (hence adopting a very different yet solid, interesting and unbiased approach). I think CWUR has reached a certain level of prominence in the past few years (strengthened by the fact that it is mentioned by the world's top universities) and deserves to be included in the original ranking list.

Best regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by H2O2O2 (talk • contribs) 17:49, June 15, 2020 (UTC)

What expert commentary and analysis is available about this ranking system? ElKevbo (talk) 22:16, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

@ElKevbo One (valuable) example would be a recent paper published by Robinson-Garcia et al. (2019) entitled "Mining university rankings: Publication output and citation impact as their basis", which provides a detailed analysis and evaluation of university rankings including US News, ARWU, THE and CWUR. The paper was published in Research Evaluation (Oxford University Press) which has an impact factor of ~3. There is another peer reviewed study (also a technical paper) by Jado and Harrison (2014) published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, which analyzes the CWUR ranking - These are just two examples among several others. There are also independent analyses such as the one made by "Study International". Regards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by H2O2O2 (talk • contribs) 16:55, June 18, 2020 (UTC)

Fair enough. (The Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management article is by Jajo and Harrison, incidentally.) ElKevbo (talk) 04:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

@ElKevbo You're right about the authors. Thanks for pointing it out. So for the ranking itself : can I add it myself or should it be done by someone else ? - Not sure what would be the next step since I'm new to this. Regards.

The template is protected so you'll need to use Template:edit template-protected to request the template be edited. If you're not familiar with template syntax then you might also need to ask for some help as administrators commonly ask or require that the edit request be very, very specific about exactly what should be added or removed from the template. I'm not personally familiar with template syntax so I'm afraid I can't be very helpful.

(And you might want to use the ping template when you want to get an editor's attention; simply using their username or an @ doesn't provide them with a notification.) ElKevbo (talk) 19:49, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

@ElKevbo: Thanks for the reply. So Should I do this on this very page ? In other words, can I create a new discussion here with an edit request (using Template:edit template-protected followed by the specific changes to be made)? I am slightly confused about it. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by H2O2O2 (talk • contribs) 13:44, July 18, 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what you'll need to do. ElKevbo (talk) 19:30, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 26 December 2020

{{Infobox US university ranking/Global
| ARWU_W = {{{ARWU_W|}}}
| QS_W = {{{QS_W|}}}
| THES_W = {{{THES_W|}}}
| USNWR_W = {{{USNWR_W|{{{USNWR_GU|}}}}}}
| WURI_W = {{{WURI_W|}}}
}}

include the WURI ranking syntax Emreturkstam (talk) 13:32, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

For clarity: WURI has been added to the docs (by the requester) and just needs to be added to the template itself. – Thjarkur (talk) 20:52, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

That was premature and has been reverted.

@Emreturkstam: Why should this new ranking be added to this template? Has this already been discussed somewhere? Have experts - scholars, major publications, etc. - begun using this ranking system? ElKevbo (talk) 21:28, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Hm, appears to be some brand new ranking created by a (as far as I can tell) non-notable entity. I couldn't find any independent coverage of it. – Thjarkur (talk) 11:54, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

SCIMAGO ranking

Can somebody please add SCImago Institutions Rankings and Webometrics Ranking of World Universities to this template? Thank you!

Heading

Since this template is used for colleges, not just universities, I think we shouldn't be piping the heading to make it just "university rankings" rather than "college and university rankings". If others agree I'll make the change. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:10, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

That's an excellent point. But I worry that changing the heading to "College and university rankings" will be confusing, too, especially for universities that have constituent colleges. How about simplifying this to "Academic rankings" ? ElKevbo (talk) 19:45, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Good thought; I'll switch it to that. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:41, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

ElKevbo, I'm realizing that the same issue also exists for other templates in Category:University and college rankings templates, but I'll leave that to others to handle, as I'm not 100% about the terminology usage outside the U.S.

One other thing I notice with this template is that, while it links to College and university rankings over the main header, it doesn't link anywhere to College and university rankings in the United States, which per MOS:SPECIFICLINK it probably should. Do you think it'd be good to add that link over the "National rankings" subheader? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:29, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, that would work. ElKevbo (talk) 05:25, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

 Done {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:11, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Should we say "4th of 366" or just "4th"?

I wonder if it might be better to include the total number of ranked institutions as part of each ranking. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:14, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm amenable to this suggestion. I think we should provide this kind of context to help readers understand what a ranking means e.g., if a ranking system creates its own stratification like USN&WR and then ranks institutions within those strata then we should include that, too. I don't know how well this would fit within the appropriate template(s) but it's worth looking into. ElKevbo (talk) 22:34, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Following up three years later to add my support to including the need for context in the infobox guidelines. We should provide context, it's an area many articles ignore UNIGUIDE and in many articles the infobox is the only place rankings are listed. It works without modifying the infobox template as well. glman (talk) 17:11, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Is Forbes still in the business of ranking colleges?

As per this comment on my talk page by @Wrrsimone:, I wonder if Forbes rankings are still a thing? No new rankings since 2019. Is it time to remove them from this US university ranking infobox? Thoughts? Thanks, GreaterPonce665 ^(TALK) 16:53, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

pinging @Sdkb:, @ElKevbo:.

@GreaterPonce665: The ping didn't go through (see the weirdness of Help:Fixing failed pings), but I had this page on my watchlist, and here's a ping for ElKevbo. I wonder, is it just a pandemic-era pause, or is it that they're permanently out of the business? What was the evidence from their website that they don't seem to be doing it anymore? If the indicators are solid, yeah, time to remove it from the template; if not, it might be prudent to wait until the 2022 rankings come out just to be sure, as it'd be a pain to have to re-add them. Someone could also just try emailing them directly and ask (maybe don't say why). {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:59, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't have any insight into this but I've asked a colleague who might. I'll let you know if she has any information on this. In the meantime, I agree with Sdkb that it doesn't hurt anything to leave the 2019 rankings in articles/templates until we know for sure what's going on (as long as they're prominently labeled as 2019 rankings; all of our rankings should be prominently labeled with their year...). ElKevbo (talk) 22:28, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Right-aligning rankings

I think the ranking numbers ought to be floated so that they're right-justified, rather than left-justified at the right edge. {{Infobox university ranking}} does this, but the U.S. version does not; see e.g. Duke University#Rankings and reputation. Would anyone be interested in making this tweak? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:25, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

 Done. Please let me know if there are any issues. The whole template at some point will need to be converted to an infobox, per the tag, to modernize the code. But I'll leave that for someone else to do. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:18, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Infobox conversion

Hi y'all! I just finished converting this template to be using {{Infobox}}. A major change was to consolidate the subtemplates into a single template. This should not only make changes to template easier, but will also make the potential for subtle vandalism easier to notice. The header link has changed to be College and university rankings in the United States rather than College and university rankings because I felt that this being a US-centric template, it should link to the US-centric page. The 'National' heading used to link to the US rankings page, but has been removed. The order of the headings has been altered. I figured 'National' should be first because it is a more general overview of ranking every college in the US. I would like to note that there is another subtemplate, /UndergraduateEngineering, which isn't included. Should it be included?

You can find these changes at the sandbox, and view the changes in the testcases (ignore 'dem cite errors). I would appreciate feedback. I intend to merge the changes in a month. Thanks! SWinxy (talk) 22:36, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi @SWinxy! Thanks so much for making that conversion; I'm looking forward to seeing it go live!

On the linking, I kinda liked having both links appear, but I think your interpretation, more along the lines of MOS:SPECIFICLINK, is a valid approach. Both rankings articles need substantial cleanup.

On the ordering, I think that it should go from most specific type/locale to least specific. There are two reasons for this. First, it will cause the U.S. News rankings, which use subcategories like liberal arts colleges, to appear first, which is warranted as they're overwhelmingly the most popular. Second, the consensus among reliable sources in education is weighted heavily against rankings overall, but to the extent that they endorse any, they much prefer ones that group similar institutions together to ones that try to flatten wildly different institutions into a single unified ranking. We should follow their lead and list the more specific ones first.

On the undergraduate engineering subtemplate, would there be any reason not to include that? Also, are you planning to merge all the way up to {{Infobox university ranking}} or not?

Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:04, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Oh, also, could you have the right justifying of the numerals retain its current behavior, as that's cleaner? I.e. for an institution that's ranked 4th in one source and 17th in another, the 4 should line up with the 7, not the 1. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:23, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

I dunno how to make it justified lol, but yeah I noticed that it looks off. I think it's misleading to link to the non-US article on rankings, even though this whole template is about US rankings. It would also imply that LibArt or baccalaureate rankings are not bound to the US.

As for the order, I am willing to change the order of the headings, but I just want to say that I feel that the order of national -> narrow -> global is what I prefer; national first because it presents a college in the context of the US as a whole, and subcategories after since I feel like it might otherwise imply one of those subcategories is most important (e.g. is putting liberal art ranking first going to imply that Wikipedia sees those colleges as more worthy than baccalaureate colleges?). US News World Report can be moved up if your only issue was with it not being first, but it's not. Are LibArt colleges most popular in your opinion? I always thought that national rankings were more popular. I'll give you the final say.

I added the engineering subtemplate because it's there; I don't see any reason not to, and there was a discussion like 12 years ago suggesting the inclusion (of others). I wanted to do this (and {{Infobox South Korean university ranking}}) because they were tagged as needing a conversion. Integrating this into the larger one seems not important. I want to merge the subtemplates because it's just wholly unnecessary. SWinxy (talk) 04:00, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

An institution will only display the categories that are relevant to it. So Yale University#Rankings won't display anything about liberal arts colleges since it's not a liberal arts college. Amherst College#Rankings will display the U.S. News liberal arts college ranking because it's a liberal arts college, but not any U.S. News national ranking because it's not ranked as a national research university. It'll display the national Forbes ranking, though, since Forbes doesn't break down institutions into subcategories. So when I'm talking about putting e.g. liberal arts college rankings first, that's only for liberal arts colleges and won't have any effect on anything else. Does that make sense? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:12, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Ahhhh yeah that makes sense. Changed it. SWinxy (talk) 04:17, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Fixed the justification. All that was needed was |body-style=text-align: right;. SWinxy (talk) 17:53, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Looks good! Oh, and I'm seeing why undergrad engineering programs wasn't previously merged and shouldn't be merged. U.S. News is the only ranking in that category. At the page for their rankings, they offer a ton of different lists, including best CS programs, best HBCUs, etc. However, when you actually click on one of the schools in the engineering list, e.g. Stanford, it's not ranked as "#N Best Engineering School" but rather "#N in National Universities". Similar for HBCUs, which when you click are categorized as liberal arts colleges at the core level. We want to be including the core categories but we don't want to include all the other more minor lists, which are not nearly as prominent. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:11, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

There are more lists (Stanford), but for engineering, the title of Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs At schools whose highest degree is a doctorate is a mouthful, so I removed it. Thanks for your feedback! Do you think it's ready to merge? SWinxy (talk) 19:09, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Yep, I'd say go ahead and merge.

One other small thing I spot, though: the change from "Academic rankings" to "U.S. Academic rankings" doesn't seem desirable, as anyone at the point in the article where they'd see this should already know which country the institution is in, so it doesn't add any new info, and it also seems to imply that we're not going to include global rankings, even though in many cases we do. So I'd just keep "Academic rankings". It does introduce a slight egg risk, but I'd say that's the lesser evil. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:32, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! It's been merged. SWinxy (talk) 22:47, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

ARWU is not national

This was covered in a previous discussion section. An editor recently wanted to remove this instance from Harvard. Perhaps it is time to remove it from the template entirely? Schools should not have the ability to add or remove it because this creates an environment potential of bickering. Altanner1991 (talk) 17:35, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree, I just removed it until other global rankings are refactored too. Mikecurry1 (talk) 16:48, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Remove the rankings

I don't think that these ranking infoboxes are useful nor encyclopedic. We all knew that U.S. News's ranking of universities and colleges suck. To quote from the article (with sources there):

The U.S. News college rankings have continued to be widely denounced by many higher education experts. Detractors argue that they rely on self-reported, sometimes fraudulent data by the institutions, encourage gamesmanship by institutions looking to improve their rank, imply a false precision by deriving an ordinal ranking from questionable data, contribute to the admissions frenzy by unduly highlighting prestige, and ignore individual fit by comparing institutions with widely diverging missions on the same scale.

Yes, I understand that college rankings are a staple of U.S. college admissions and I do understand that we shouldn't WP:Right great wrongs by ignoring a well-known piece of fact for ideals sake. But even so, putting rankings in individual universities are not that useful; it would be much better to see the U.S. News rankings in a dedicated Wikipedia list and compare the schools together. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:24, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

P.S. This argument also apply to other related rankings and infoboxes, such as {{Infobox university rankings}}. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:27, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

When considering due weight, I think Wikipedia ought to balance a general audience with subject matter experts. In this case, the general audience weighting would have us putting the ranking in the lead infobox, which thankfully we don't do (although a lot of universities have it in the lead prose, something we're trying to stamp out). And as you point out, the subject matter experts would have us leave it out entirely. I think including it in a reputation section part-way down an article, accompanied by views by reputable scholars in the prose, is a happy medium. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:46, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. CactiStaccingCrane, you're welcome to nominate this template for deletion; I'm not optimistic that the nomination would be successful but you certainly have the right to make it. ElKevbo (talk) 23:50, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and usually a lot more people find these rankings right at the website instead. I'd agree with Sdkb that we should detail about the school's reputation in prose instead. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 01:32, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Outdated

The current auto-generated references are from 2020 and 2021; however for (at least the) USNWR rankings page is currently running current data (for the 2022-2023 school year). We shouldn't be saying the data is from 2021 if the data is actual from later... We need to fix this. --Jayron32 17:25, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, this has been a problem for a while. The way it has worked, if I understand correctly, is that someone will go through all the articles and update the rankings, and then once they've done that, they'll update the reference with the new year. But sometimes they forget one or the other, other times they don't complete the run, and still other times the run will be delayed and editors at individual articles will do updates that desync the data. It's definitely not optimal, and I'd be interested in discussion about how to make the system work better. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:19, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

If there aren't any copyright issues - and I think there may be but I'm not a lawyer - then this information looks like a prime candidate for adding to Wikidata where we can update it all in once place and just have the template pull the data from there. ElKevbo (talk) 22:13, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd agree with that. The main issue is that there's currently no property specifically for the U.S. News rankings or any other, but there is a general ranking property we can use with a qualifier to specify which one. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 14:13, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Niche ranking

Considering Forbes and ARWU is already on this list, I propose we also add the ranking from Niche, which I think is more popular than both of these. Apparently, 50% high school seniors have a Niche account and a recent article on Inside Higher Ed listed Niche as the 2nd most influential ranking lists just behind US News. It was frequently discussed in college forums among the US News and WSJ rankings. NguyenLeDongHai (talk) 02:32, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Updating source for infobox field THE_WSJ

The infobox field THE_WSJ, under national rankings for Times Higher Education / Wall Street Journal (THE | WSJ) should be updated from using:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/rankings/united-states/2022

to

https://www.wsj.com/rankings/college-rankings/best-colleges-2024

Am I able to go ahead with this alternation? Kingapresa (talk) 23:10, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

@ElKevbo, @Sdkb, The WSJ is no longer collaborating with THE on rankings. What are your thoughts on updating the template to WSJ/College Pulse? THE/WSJ rankings are two years old and may be misleading when displayed next to the latest rankings. Redraiderengineer (talk) 23:09, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, that sounds right. I do worry that this will make some articles out-of-sync or incorrect if they have old, outdated rankings but that's a separate problem (that could be addressed by moving the rankings into Wikidata where they could all be updated across all articles at one time or by getting a bot to update articles when new rankings are released). ElKevbo (talk) 20:59, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Unused subpages nominated for deletion

Template:Infobox US university ranking/Regional and similar subpages of this template have been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:55, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Broken Reference Error

The infobox seems to be causing some broken reference errors on downstream pages. See Case_Western_Reserve_University#References, Catholic_University_of_America#References and Florida_Atlantic_University#References for a few examples, they're all looking for Rankings_ARWU reference.

Not sure how to resolve, as the diff for latest ARWU [1] looks fine. Should I roll back?

Thanks! SpookyTwenty (talk) 22:09, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

I've added a fix for this cite error. The error occurred when the ARWU_W parameter had a value but ARWU_NU parameter was empty. There is now a check for this situation. Thanks! Redraiderengineer (talk) 23:04, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks very much!! SpookyTwenty (talk) 23:09, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

This template causes articles using it to generate undefined references

Hello Mikecurry1! Your recent edit ends up causing undefined footnote errors in many dozens of articles. Looks like your intent was to remove the ARWU_NU parameter and the references it generates, but you've done an incomplete job of it. I've removed another use of the ARWU_NU parameter, which was producing those errors (or would generate the same reference you were trying to remove.) Is that the correct fix?

Also, removing his parameter leaves many dozens of articles with invalid parameters. Do you have a plan for cleaning them up? -- mikeblas (talk) 23:04, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, mikeblas! Excellent point — I wish I had thought of that earlier. I’ve requested a bot to help automate the process of removing the invalid | ARWU_NU = [ranking number] parameters from the Infobox US University Ranking across affected articles at Wikipedia:Bot requests.

If you have any other suggestions or ideas on how to address this, I would greatly appreciate your input!

Thanks again for bringing this up! Mikecurry1 (talk) 20:59, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Was it your intention to also remove the ARWU_W parameter? That's what my change did. If you didn't want it to be removed, then a different change to the template code is necessary. I see that ARWU_U is still in the template documentation. But I think it would produce the same reference that you objected to in your edit comments. -- mikeblas (talk) 21:12, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Haven't heard back from you, Mikecurry1.

Meanwhile, Redraiderengineer has reverted your changes. But the template is still broken because it generates undefined reference errors for "Rankings_ARWU" when it is invoked. This error is visible on the template page itself, and in some articles -- Harvard University, for example, after Marco Carrasco replaced the ARWU_NU parameter on that page's invocation of the template. How is this template meant to behave? Surely, it shouldn't be introducing referencing errors into articles. -- mikeblas (talk) 00:06, 31 October 2024 (UTC)