Rankled By Rankings? Blame College Presidents for Gaming the System

Columbia University misrepresented its data and dropped in U.S. News Best Colleges rankings from No. 2 in 2021 to No. 18 this month.

So how did the education students receive at Columbia change?

It didn’t.

Had it not been for a whistleblower, no one would have known about the cooked numbers. Had it not been for the media firestorm, few people would have noticed.

The sound and fury over U.S. News Best Colleges rankings — heard repeatedly in the last few months and over the previous three decades — signifies nothing.

Today’s hysteria is another needless reaction to a numbers game driven almost entirely by commercial interests. Rankings companies hype findings to boost profits. College presidents hype rankings to boost applications. The biggest losers are students and parents who don’t realize colleges have been misrepresenting data for decades.

“The broader lesson everyone should keep in mind is that U.S. News has shown its operations are so shoddy that both of them are meaningless,” the Columbia whistleblower, math professor Michael Thaddeus, told the New York Times recently. “If any institution can decline from No. 2 to No. 18 in a single year, it just discredits the whole ranking operation.”

Nearly three decades ago, the Wall Street Journal exposed widespread data-collecting inconsistencies in U.S. News Best Colleges rankings and implicated schools in the deception. By manipulating data, colleges could better their U.S. News rank, the investigation found. New York University, Boston University, even Harvard were rank-boosting through data manipulation, as were lesser-known colleges like Colby, Bard, and Christian Brothers University.

At the time, Stanford’s president urged U.S. News to move toward greater honesty and away from false precision. “Instead of tinkering to ‘perfect’ the weightings and formulas,” he asked, could it not “question the basic premise? Could you not admit that quality may not be truly quantifiable?”

The next year, U.S. News dropped Stanford from No. 1 to No. 6, behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

Meanwhile, U.S. News editors continued tinkering with weights and categories. And that caused big problems.

Altering the formula even a little from year to year invalidates annual comparisons, the former managing editor of Best Colleges, Alvin Sanoff, concluded in a 2007 scholarly article that received almost no attention. Though editors knew tinkering voided year-to-year results, they did little to publicize the flaw, except to include a footnote explaining how that year’s rankings “are not directly comparable to those published in previous years.”

“Those within the magazine have always known that year-to-year comparisons of a school’s ranking are not valid in years when changes are made in the methodology,” a point the magazine “has not always stressed . . . in talking with other news organizations,” Sanoff wrote.

Without valid comparisons, there are no winners and losers. Without winners and losers, there is no competition. Without competition, there is no news to break, no headline to shout, no revelations to sell, no academic arms race to chronicle and promote.

But instead of battling a multi-million-dollar corporation, many college presidents decided, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” They bemoaned rankings publicly, and extolled them privately to appease trustees and donors looking for bottom-line results.

Describing the relationships between college presidents and the U. S. News Best Colleges guide, journalist Andrew Ferguson drove home the point in “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College.”

Presidents “read it, feed it, fidget all summer until the new edition arrives and then wave it around like a bride’s garter belt if their school gets a favorable review.”

In the last 20 years, so many colleges have misreported data that U.S. News has only punished the most flagrant, with penalties that rarely deflate status, a survey of news reports revealed. Not even the demands of angry U.S. senators could beat back Best College’s corrupting influence. In a 2018 letter, six senators requested changes, publicly accusing U. S. News of creating “perverse incentive for schools to adopt or maintain policies that perpetuate social and economic inequalities.”

Nothing changed.

While tuition soars and scholarships decline, few Americans are attending the elite colleges that U.S. News is famous for promoting. In fact, only 40 percent of 18-24 year-olds enrolled in college at all in 2020. Of those, nearly three fourths are attending public colleges and universities.

Just about everyone who wants to go to college can get into one. The average acceptance rate at private colleges is 66 percent and more than 70 percent at public schools.

But here’s the problem: The academic arms race isn’t about the struggle to crash the gates at U.S. News Best Colleges top ranked schools. It’s a battle for access to affordable degrees. The people who would most benefit from degrees often can’t afford them. For that data — to find out which colleges graduate students with the most and least debt — you’ll have to pay U.S. News $39.99.

Susan Paterno, author of “GAME ON: Why College Admissions is Rigged,” St. Martin’s Press, is a professor of English at Chapman University. She writes about excess, access, and equity in higher education.