That’s it. You’ve been banned permanently from the NE. ???
You probably don’t like apples or maple syrup either.
Possible that Colby College may have rejected an applicant whose parent helped compile the rating.
There is no reason for Colby College’s omission from the WSJ / THE US college rankings other than an oversight or an intentional slight. Either way, Colby College & its students, teachers & healthy endowment & brand new athletic center will live on.
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Hmmm… which is more plausible - that Colby, in their lack of transparency for the past several application cycles, did not provide all the necessary data or " Colby College may have rejected an applicant whose parent helped compile the rating" and intentional slights. 
The common data set that Colby completed, which is posted in College Data, is 2018-2019. If you look at the “financial matters” section (and others) of the common data set it says the year.
Colby may be missing from the WSJ/THE survey because:
"In addition, some colleges did not meet our threshold for a valid number of respondents (greater than or equal to 50) to the student survey in 2019. "
Aunt Becky could help with this while she’s doing her 10-20 stretch in the pokie…
@GKUnion: I like your sense of humor.
Community service?
@bloomfield88 could be, but then why are all of Colby’s peer schools on the list? That doesn’t seem to make sense.
Agree that the college must not have responded to questions from WSJ or did not have enough student surveys to qualify. As other said, by any measure it is a top 100 college. And while there is no doubt that their acceptance rate has dropped significantly because of their no essay and no application fee, they are hardly alone in encouraging more apps (Middlebury and Bates also have no supplements).
And to the person in this thread who said their child received a mailing from the school even though they didn’t have the stats, I ask which school hasn’t done this? My daughter received mailings from Harvard and Princeton and she had zero chance of getting into those schools (also, Colby does not offer scholarships, just financial aid, so they never would have offered a scholarship in a mailing.)
While rankings serve their purpose to generally categorize schools, if you want real up-to-date information on the college, please reach out to those of us on the forum with children who currently attend. My daughter is only a first-year, but has found the other students smart, supportive, friendly and motivated. She loves her professors and the opportunities offered at the school. While no one school is right for everyone, I can say that rankings or no rankings, it is a top-tier LAC. Please feel free to DM me with any questions.
As a point of reference, Colby placed 71st in this ranking one year ago.
hvierwer yes some schools do these random mailings in an effort to garner more applications which allows them to reject more students lowering their acceptance rate. Why would you send valuable $$ recruiting candidates you don’t want?
Yes, the mailing spoke about their merit scholarships and financial giveaways.
@doschicos, you previously have criticized Colby admissions, and that is fine. At the same time, recognize that Colby has an established academic reputation. It would be a shame to discourage others with fit from a school that provides an outstanding education.
Colby’s current president did insist on a good admissions office when he came on. The numbers to some extent parallel Chicago’s experience when he was there (no one seems to remember the 40% admit rate of Chicago, now a mere shadow of itself).
You don’t see from Colby the deception of the Claremont Colleges (do you remember Claremont McKenna outright lying about its numbers).
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/18/claremont-mckenna-admits-extent-deception-admissions-statistics.
There have been admissions changes, but first let’s identify the starting line. In the 2000s, Colby was one of the more conservative admissions programs, with multiple essays and the ACT/SAT required. Colby was one of the later NESCAC schools to become test optional, decades later than Bates or Bowdoin. It allowed test choice at about the same time as Middlebury and Hamilton, and in 2018 went test optional, after Wesleyan. Notably, Chicago is now test optional.
There has been no admission fee for a long time, and it is tough to criticize a school for not charging a fee, particularly when some think these fees are cash cows.
If you criticize eliminating the supplemental essays, then again criticize the other schools that have done the same, as again, Colby was not the first to do so.
As far as the common data set goes, I agree. It should be available. I am not sure , however, that it tells much about fluffy admissions practices. It is a useful tool to compare schools using common benchmarks, because statistics in a vacuum can be confusing. For example, some schools report admitted student statistics while others reported enrolled student statistics. The CDS allows school comparison with a common matriculating student benchmark. The CDS, however, does not give stats for rejected applicants, which could actually be telling. If most of the rejected applicants were, for example, in the lowest quadrant of their high school class, that would evince fluff on admissions numbers. Unfortunately, the CDS doesn’t show that.
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Thanks for your boosterism. 
I have no skin in this game so I can be objective.
No doubt, Colby provides an excellent education. Neither I nor anyone else here has claimed otherwise. Just stating the facts that Colby is a) not as transparent as most other schools of its caliber and b) has changed its tactics in marketing over the recent years which has contributed, along with other things, to a declining acceptance rate.
No need to talk about “the other schools that have done the same” as they are not being discussed here. This thread is about why Colby didn’t make a newspaper’s rankings. Just pointing out valid reasons why that might have happened. Why do you think Colby isn’t in the rankings?
I’ll admit that I highly value transparency. It raises red flags when a school chooses not to publish CDS publicly and accessibly. Why would they not want to make that available? What are they trying to hide?
If you don’t participate in these things by providing info, you don’t get ranked. Simple as that. Colby apparently cooperated with USN. Did not with WSJ.
To be fair, Colby allegedly preceded CMC in a similar, though perhaps unintentional, action:
Note, however, that the general allegations against Colby refer to a concerted effort, while those at CMC were isolated to an individual. (Note as well that the Claremonts as a group were not implicated.)
More transparency is better, to be sure. No one argues that point. Nor can anyone argue that the USNWR collegiate arms race has had countless negative side-effects.
@merc81, that 1992 incident recounted in the 1995 WSJ article is inexcusable, but equally unsettling are the other institutions named in that article. Unacceptable, no matter how you look at it, even if it is well over 20 years ago. I am unaware of a more recent incident, but that doesn’t mean that it could not have happened.
Even if there has been no recent incident, I do think the risk is potentially higher when you don’t have transparency and when you have hyper focus on pushing your admissions staff to deliver on things like acceptance rate.
Like all businesses, management has to be careful about the incentives both positive and negative - the carrots and sticks used. Sometimes you risk getting results you don’t want. Some of the cases at other schools in the past decade seem to be prompted by employees trying to meet target and/or massage data to make them look like they are doing better than they were doing.
@hviewer thank you so much for sharing your daughter’s positive experience. I completely agree that personal experience is so much more valuable than rankings!
I really appreciate everyone on this thread being willing to share opinions, knowledge, resources, etc. I think we can probably all agree that more transparency is a good thing. I personally think that Colby made a mistake if it intentionally did not provide the WSJ with the stats they needed and it is making a mistake by not making the CDS publicly and easily available. I also agree with those who have said that it is an excellent academic school, which almost makes this mistake worse. I would like to think that it is inadvertent! It would be a shame to have Colby’s rising and deserved reputation threatened in any way by something like this. Thanks again to all who have contributed - I am so grateful for your time and considered thoughts.