When U.S. News & World Report debuted its list of "America's Best Colleges" nearly 30 years ago, the magazine hoped its college rankings would be a game-changer for students and families. But arguably, they've had a much bigger effect on colleges themselves.
Yes, students and families still buy the guide and its less famous competitors by the hundreds of thousands, and they still care about a college's reputation. But it isn't students who obsess over every incremental shift on the rankings scoreboard, regularly embarrassing themselves in the process. It's colleges.
It's colleges that have spent billions on financial aid for high-scoring students who don't actually need the money, motivated at least partly by the quest for rankings glory.
It was a college, Baylor University, that paid students it had already accepted to retake the SAT exam in a transparent ploy to boost the average scores it could report. It's colleges that have awarded bonuses to presidents who lift their school a few slots.
And it's colleges that occasionally get caught in the kind of cheating you might expect in sports or on Wall Street, but which seems especially ignominious coming from professional educators.
The latest example came last week at Claremont McKenna, a highly regarded California liberal arts college where a senior administrator resigned after acknowledging he falsified college entrance exam scores for years to rankings publications such as U.S. News.
The scale was small: submitting scores just 10 or 20 points higher on the 1,600-point SAT math and reading exams. Average test scores account for just 7.5 percent of the U.S. News rankings formula. Still, the magazine acknowledged the effect could have been to move the college up a slot or two in its rankings of top liberal arts colleges. And so it was hard not to notice Claremont McKenna stood at No. 9 in this year's rankings, which to people who care about such things sounds much sweeter than No. 11.
If it was an effort to gain an edge, it backfired badly. Another popular list, Kiplinger's "Best College Values," said Friday that it was removing Claremont McKenna from its 2011-12 rankings entirely because of the false reporting. The college had been No. 18 on its list of best-value liberal arts colleges.
"When I started in this business, I thought, 'The rankings are terrible,'" said Brad MacGowan, a 21-year-veteran college counselor at Newton North High School outside Boston. "But spending all this time with students, I just don't hear that much about them. I'm sure it's colleges that are perpetuating it."
It's hard to know how common cheating is, given that while U.S. News cross-checks some data with other sources, it relies largely on colleges themselves to provide it.
But most rankings critics say that by far the most pernicious failure of colleges isn't blatant cheating but what they do more openly — allowing the rankings formula to drive their goals and policies.
Colleges, they argue, have caved to the rankings pressure in a range of ways. A big one is recruiting as many students as they can to apply, even if they're not likely to be a good fit, just to boost their selectivity numbers. And they've showered financial aid on high-achieving, and often wealthy, kids with high SAT scores.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement