Wall Street Journal | Courtesy Flickr
The Wall Street Journal continued a years-long habit of excluding Hillsdale College from its college rankings this year because it does not participate in federal student aid programs, according to a spokesperson for the Wall Street Journal College Rankings.
“Being left out of the Wall Street Journal rankings is an ongoing thing, and it’s not because they are out to get us, in my opinion, or anything like that,” Hillsdale College’s Director of Institutional Research Joshua Trojniak said. “It’s a question of data availability and methodology.”
The Wall Street Journal analyzed research in partnership with the College Pulse and Statista, weighting different components as they see fit, with “student outcomes” beginning weighed at 70%, “learning environment” weighed at 20%, and “diversity” weighed at 10%, according to the Journal’s website.
“Hillsdale College does not participate in Title IV federal student aid programs, which is one of the eligibility criteria to be included in the ranking,” the report’s spokesperson said.
The top 10 “2025 Best Colleges in the U.S.” are Princeton University, Babson College, Stanford University, Yale University, Claremont McKenna College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of California Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology’s main campus, and Davidson College, according to the Journal.
The Princeton Review ranked Hillsdale earlier this year as No. 2 in “Most Engaged in Community Service,” “Most Politically Conservative Students,” and “Most Religious Students.”
“If the Wall Street Journal isn’t going to include all colleges in its rankings, then the rankings are useless,” Buddy Moorehouse, an adjunct instructor of documentary journalism at Hillsdale, said in an email. “It’s like saying that certain college football teams won’t be ranked just because they play on natural grass instead of artificial turf. They’re free to use whatever criteria they want, but I doubt that Hillsdale students and families care very much what the Wall Street Journal thinks. Hillsdale College should be praised for not accepting government money, not punished.”
All colleges that accept federal money must report data to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which Hillsdale reports some data to voluntarily, according to Trojniak. He also said schools that accept federal funding provide data through other means, such as student loans, Pell Grants, and federal student loans that help those gathering information for statistical analysis that Hillsdale does not offer.
“None of the college surveys give the secret sauce of the exact formula of how they weigh all the different factors and so on,” Trojniak said. “But even with just the general overview of general methodology, it’s pretty obvious to me that the reason why we’re not being ranked is because they don’t have data for us because there’s no data to report.”
Five Hillsdale alumni currently work at the Wall Street Journal: Jillian Melchoir ’09, Liz Essley Whyte ’11, Kate Bachelder Odell ’13, Jack Butler ’15, and Nicole Ault ’19. The Collegian’s current editor-in-chief, senior Thomas McKenna, was a Bartley Fellow on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal over the summer.
