Students and their parents got one more reason this week to be skeptical of college rankings, the most widely-used of which are published by U.S. News & World Report. Los Angeles area private school Claremont McKenna admitted it had “fudged it’s numbers” in the words of The New York Times, to try and get higher rankings. Going all the way back to 2005, the school apparently supplied false numbers for student SAT scores, a critical number in the all important rankings.
“The reliance on this [rankings] is out of hand,” Jon Boeckenstedt, DePaul University Admissions associate VP told The Times. His view echoes those of many other educators who have repeatedly complained that the rankings are less than trustworthy. In a survey conducted in 2010 by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), educators were asked to evaluate the quality of U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings. On a scale of 1 to 100, the educators gave U.S. News and average raking of just 28.1.
In the fall of 2011, NACAC issued a report stating that U.S. News’ methods of using metrics to rank colleges are “essentially arbitrary.” The group followed up with a request the U.S. News & World Report integrate more meaningful metrics like student satisfaction surveys and educational attainment tests, but the magazine responded that it has no intention of changing it’s methods.
But as the Claremont McKenna incident shows, colleges and universities know that, however flawed they may be, students use the rankings when shopping for schools. A long line of abuses by colleges trying to get high rankings have included Iona College’s notorious effort to lie for years not just about SAT scores, but also about and other key metrics. One of the more intersting incidents involved Baylor University, which gave students financial incentives to re-take SAT tests, in an effort to create a higher average score.
Schools have also resorted to tactics that are shady, if not downright dishonest, to try in inflate their rankings. Among those are pushing lots of alumni to give donations of just a few dollars to inflate the percentage of old students who give, and creating lots of classes with less than 20 students – a positive point in the ratings – even if it means creating other classes that have huge numbers of students.
If you’re shopping for a school, online or on campus, the message is that, while there’s nothing wrong with looking at rankings, they’re not a completely trustworthy source of information.