[Mb-civic] College rankings or junk science? - Robert Kuttner - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  College rankings or junk science?

By Robert Kuttner  |  February 25, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IT'S APPROACHING that season when students and their parents anxiously 
await college admissions decisions. But increasingly, an equally 
feverish process is infecting the other side of the transaction and 
distorting the process of who gets financial aid.

Colleges these days engage in an ever more frantic competition for 
''rankings," driven almost entirely by the annual U.S. News & World 
Report issue on ''America's Best Colleges." U.S. News is so dominant 
that when a dean boasts that his school is ranked in the top 10, or a 
president's bonus is based on whether his college makes it into the top 
50, they invariably refer to U.S. News.

Massive efforts by admission departments, deans, and college presidents 
are devoted to gaming the U.S. News ranking system, published every 
August. This includes everything from manipulating who is considered a 
part-time student (which raises the reported performance of full-time 
students) to giving students temporary research jobs in order to raise 
the placement score reported to U.S. News. But the easiest single way to 
raise rankings is by enrolling students with ever higher SAT scores.

If the average score of your entering freshman class increases, the U.S. 
News ranking will probably improve, too. And if your ranking goes up, 
the presumed prestige of the college will follow. More kids will apply, 
more applicants will choose your college rather than brand X, and, best 
of all, more families will pay sticker price.

This competition spawns many evils that should shame a higher education 
system devoted to intellectual honesty. But perhaps the worst thing 
about it is what the ranking obsession is doing to the allocation of 
financial aid. More and more scholarship money is being shifted from aid 
based on financial need to aid based on ''merit."

That sounds nice -- who could be opposed to merit? But today's ''merit 
scholarships" are primarily bait to attract students with very high SAT 
scores who don't need the aid. The flip side is less aid available to 
students from less affluent families, who can't attend college without 
aid, or who must sacrifice academic work to paid jobs, or who graduate 
with staggering debt loads.

There is, of course, a limited pot of financial aid. One reason tuitions 
keep relentlessly rising is that some of the tuition money goes to 
underwrite financial aid budgets. That would be defensible, even 
laudable -- if colleges were ''taxing" affluent families in order to 
redistribute aid money to less affluent ones. But when higher tuitions 
spin off scholarships for other affluent kids intended mainly to raise 
rankings, the result is to doubly raise barriers to poor and middle 
class kids, with both higher tuition barriers and diminished aid.

One result: poorer performance by poorer kids. Forty percent of all 
college students from the most affluent quarter of the population get a 
bachelor's degree within five years. For kids in the bottom income 
quarter, the figure is just six percent, according to a new book, 
''Strapped," by Tamara Draut.

Another consequence: Affluent families pass their affluence along to 
their children. According to studies by Anthony P. Carnevale and Steven 
J. Rose, nearly three-quarters of students at elite universities are 
from the wealthiest quarter of the population. Just 3 percent are from 
the bottom quarter.

The U.S. News process for ranking colleges and universities has been 
almost universally condemned by specialists as junk science. Publishing 
a data-rich guide to colleges is a service. What's bogus is the supposed 
ranking. As any statistician will tell you, you can't reasonably combine 
entirely unrelated variables (test scores, reputation, placements, 
spending per student, student aid, etc.) into a single linear index. 
Worse, the criteria and their weightings are arbitrary. It's hard anough 
for colleges to come up with financial aid based on need, without a 
spurious ranking contest creating inducements to subsidize the already 
privileged.

The data sent by colleges to U.S. News are self-reported and unaudited. 
Also, many of the factors are entirely subjective to begin with. One 
dean told me that when she rates reputations of other comparable 
graduate schools, she hasn't a clue how to rate more than a few. There 
is also the all-too-human temptation to downgrade the near competition.

Oregon's Reed College, for more than a decade, has stopped cooperating 
with U.S. News. The college's president, Colin Diver, writing in the 
Atlantic, reported that liberation from this annual hazing has freed 
Reed to ''pursue our own educational philosophy, not that of some 
magazine." Reed has thrived.

Others should follow Reed's lead and just boycott this travesty.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/25/college_rankings_or_junk_science/
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