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college rankings exposed
TM
www.petersons.com
When an institution is on the move--for better or worse--it can
take years for the changes to become obvious even to those on campus.
In real life, the insignificant fluctuations that take place from year to
year do not have any meaningful impact on its relative quality of the
education students receive. When tracked over a longer time--5 or 10
years--it is sometimes possible to discern trends. But many other col-
leges simply sustain their random ups and downs.
Cooking the Books
The presumed importance of rankings has produced one of the most per-
sistent criticisms of rankings--cheating--or what Rothkopf calls, "cooking
the books." In the false precision of U.S. News' ranking formula, even small
improvement in a college's admission yield, financial resources, or average
SAT score can move a college or university up the list. This may give the
college a small, but important, competitive advantage and, in the end, help
the college truly become a hot school or, at least, a slightly hotter school.
For the first 10 years, U.S. News did little to verify the accuracy of the
numbers reported by colleges, and an alarming number of institutions
failed to live up to this kind of honor system. In 1992 the admission
director of Colby College in Maine stumbled on the benefits of lying
when he accidentally misreported the percentage of incoming freshman
who were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. He told U.S.
News it was an impressive 80 percent. The real number was 60 percent.
That error happened to push Colby up five places in the rankings,
but it also created a new dilemma. An accurate and honest report the next
year would produce an alarming drop in the rankings. What to do? This
time, the admissions director was forced to deliberately falsify some other
data, inflating the amount of money spent per student on education, which
indeed helped to sustain the college's forward march.
In 1995, Rothkopf sponsored a national conference among colleges
and publishers of college guides to discuss the system. Unfortunately,
