What the “2026” U.S. News Update Tells Us
By Ben Brown
When we bring up the subject of U.S. News rankings, fellow alumni are quick to point out that the rankings are a flawed, reductive instrument. Do college presidents chase U.S. News clout at the expense of more holistic attention to academic program quality? Or make even worse compromises to achieve good rankings? It’s unsurprising that alumni of a college that has had no numerical grades until this year tend to see U.S. News’ formulae as arbitrary, if not procrustean.
Yet, all but the most intrepid souls among us agree that the rankings can’t be safely ignored. Even a flawed instrument can pick up a very large-scale decline in quality, which is what New College is experiencing. Secondly, no college president in the real world—surely, no actual New College president in recent decades—can, or has, ignored the rankings. Among other reasons, publications that profile and rank colleges are a venue for marketing.
The community has under-noticed the fact that after last appearing in Fiske Guide to Colleges’ 2024 edition, New College disappeared from that guide and doesn’t appear in either the 2025 or 2026 editions. New College is still in The Princeton Review’s The Best 391 Colleges—for now. Like these two publications, U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges is a mainstay of high school guidance counselors, and a consumer product for thousands of college-hopeful students and their families. The U.S. higher ed. scene is vast and confusing, and the college application process for high school students is overwhelming: students have to identify and sort options somehow, and U.S. News remains a heavily present consumer resource.
New College has fallen by 59 places in U.S. News’ “National Liberal Arts Colleges” ranking since the 2023 edition came out (we’re now working with the 2026 edition, released this September). That is an astonishing plummet, perhaps outpacing the annual rate of decline of any other institution in that ranking—or any similar ranking.
Looking at the breakdown of New College’s performance in the 2026 edition, we see a more mottled performance than we expected. We shudder to think of the expenditures the Corcoran regime has engaged in to somehow produce upticks in enrollment, SAT scores, and ACT scores from a declining applicant pool that only measured 1,623 in Fall, 2024. And the decline of the applicant pool is, to us, the biggest story: from 2,119 to 1,623, a 23% decrease in size.
We caution that under expert management of an admissions office, applicant pool size is notoriously manipulable. However, New College is currently gathering an applicant pool so small that it suggests either poor management, institutional instability—or both.
Data related to New College of Florida reported in U.S. News(1)
(1) We gathered all data from U.S. News’ College Compass tool, in which New College’s profile is available at https://premium.usnews.com/best-colleges/new-college-of-florida-153704. This profile of New College is regularly updated by U.S. News each September, and was updated in September, 2025. Our reporting is based on our review of the profile in August, 2025 and October, 2025, respectively.
