About College Clash
College Clash is a crowd-voted college ranking: visitors pick which of two universities is better, and every vote updates the live ranking. It covers 49 well-known schools, mostly US universities, and needs no account. The ranking measures how voters perceive the schools, not their academic quality.
How it works
The vote page shows two schools, each as a campus photo in the school's colors. You tap the one you think is better. There is no skip button and no account; the next matchup appears right away.
Every vote counts as one head-to-head result: a win for the school you picked and a loss for the other. The rankings page orders all schools by the crowd's results so far, and each school has its own page with its record and head-to-head results.
How the ranking is calculated
The ranking uses an Elo-style rating system, the same idea used to rank chess players. Every school starts with the same rating. Each vote moves the winner up and the loser down by the same amount.
How far they move depends on how surprising the result is. When a school beats one rated well above it, both ratings move a lot; when a school beats one rated well below it, they barely move. As a result, a school's rank reflects whom it beat, not only how often it won, so two schools with the same win percentage can be ranked differently.
Matchups are drawn from a mix of well-known rivalries, schools that are close in the current ranking, and random pairs; see the FAQ below. Votes are anonymous. Automated or repetitive voting from one source is filtered out and does not change the ranking.
What it is and isn't
It is a running poll of the people who visit the site: a measure of how they perceive these schools against each other. It is not a measure of academic quality, research output, graduate outcomes, cost, or fit, and the voters are a self-selected group rather than a representative sample.
College Clash is not affiliated with or endorsed by any university or by US News & World Report. US News ranks are shown only for comparison. The site uses no school logos, seals, or mascots; campus photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licenses and are credited on the photo credits page. School colors are approximations.
Your personal ranking
The Me page ranks schools by your own votes. It starts from the crowd ranking (blended with US News order while the crowd has few votes on a school) and moves each school according to your picks, so schools you never voted on stay near the crowd order instead of jumping around. It also shows where you disagree with the crowd and with US News, and makes a shareable image.
Your votes are stored in your browser, with a backup tied to an anonymous browser cookie so they survive browsers that clear site storage. You can also mark one school in your personal top five as your dream school.
FAQ
- Is this ranking official?
- No. College Clash is an independent, unofficial site. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any university or by US News & World Report. The ranking is the opinion of the people who vote here, not an assessment of academic quality.
- How often does the ranking update?
- Continuously. Each vote changes the two schools' ratings immediately, and the rankings page refreshes itself while it is open. The up and down arrows show how many places a school has moved over the last hour (or the last four hours when few schools have moved in the last hour).
- How are matchups chosen?
- About 15% of matchups are well-known rivalries (for example Harvard vs. Yale or Duke vs. UNC), about 20% pair schools that are close in the current ranking, and the remaining 65% are random pairs. Schools with fewer votes so far are picked slightly more often so that they catch up. Which school appears on the left is random, and the site avoids showing you a matchup you have already seen in the last 24 hours.
- Can I vote more than once?
- Yes. You can keep voting on as many matchups as you like; each one is a separate vote. Every matchup comes with a short-lived, single-use code, and automated or repetitive voting from one source is filtered out so that it does not move the ranking.
- Which schools are included?
- 49 schools: 42 US national universities (chosen from the top of the US News National Universities list), 5 liberal arts colleges, and Oxford and Cambridge. The rankings page lists each national university's US News rank next to its crowd rank for comparison; liberal arts colleges are ranked by US News on a separate list, so they show no US News rank.
- Why isn't my school here?
- The list is a hand-picked set of widely known schools, kept short so that each matchup gets enough votes for the ranking to mean something. It may be expanded over time. Leaving a school out is not a judgment about it.
- Do you show the ratings behind the ranking?
- No. The site shows ranks, win–loss records, and win percentages, but not the underlying rating numbers.