Many Midwesterners may be unfamiliar with Claremont McKenna College. It’s a highly selective liberal arts school in Southern California with much to recommend it: rigorous and diverse courses, a beautiful campus in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, a desirably low student-to-faculty ratio and wonderful job prospects for graduates. The starting median salary for graduates of Claremont McKenna, $54,400, is among the highest for the nation’s liberal arts colleges. A convenient way to learn about the school is the U.S. News & World Report 2012 Best Colleges Rankings. Claremont was rated an impressive ninth best in the national liberal arts college category.
And now you can throw away all the information in that paragraph. It can’t be trusted.
The school recently revealed that a senior administrator inflated the SAT scores of incoming freshmen for at least six years to raise its rankings in U.S. News and other college guides. The changes were small, 10 to 30 points, but might have been enough to knock Claremont out of the prestigious Top 10 in its category. Kiplinger’s magazine has dropped the school from its list of best values.
Claremont is one of several universities that have been found recently to have rigged performance numbers to enhance their prestige in the carefully followed guides to colleges.
*Iona College in New York admitted last fall that it provided false information to the magazine. Iona was ranked 30th among regional universities in the Northeast, but U.S. News said Iona would have ranked 50th based on accurate information.
*Baylor University paid students it had already accepted into the school to retake the SAT, in a bid to raise its ranking.
*The law schools of the University of Illinois and Villanova manipulated data about admitted applicants to enhance their reputations.
Is the problem here overreliance on the U.S. News ratings? Many academics think so. A report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) harshly criticized the U.S. News system: “They have created a frenzy of competition among campuses that has also added to the frenzy experienced by students who are trying to be competitive to be admitted. They have turned college presidents into CFOs and fundraisers. They have turned admissions efforts into high-level marketers, and forced colleges to manipulate admissions stats, waiting list lengths, and lead students on to get them to apply.”
Crocodile tears. Blaming the U.S. News rankings is an evasion of responsibility. In the realm of higher education, it is reminiscent of the actor Tim Matheson’s speech in “Animal House” arguing in front of the dean, in an attempt to exonerate his obviously guilty fraternity mates: “The issue here isn’t whether we broke a few rules … we did … but isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society?”
The issue here is dishonesty by people who are entrusted to inculcate values in our children. Highly placed and highly paid college officials committed these falsifications. At Villanova, the former law school dean and three admissions officers inflated the numbers for years.
People like rankings. Newspapers and magazines rank everything — restaurants, lawyers, doctors, movies. It is human nature for students, parents, college counselors, alumni and professors to pay close attention to the ups and downs of college rankings, whether its the college football Top 25 or the U.S. News business school ratings. The college evaluations by U.S. News and other raters are hardly absolute measures, but they do help students and parents learn about faraway schools like Claremont. People should accept the ratings as guides. Highly rated restaurants don’t always serve the best meals. For some students, a school rated 99th in the nation is a better fit than Princeton.
The real problem is not the public’s obsession with ratings — it is the colleges’ obsession. Colleges have a number of ways to falsely enhance their ratings. They can report incorrect numbers, as Claremont did. They can solicit unqualified applicants to improve their exclusivity scores or defer admission of lower-scoring applicants until school ratings have been reported.
“The behavior of colleges at the apparent whim of their boards to increase their ranking for U.S. News creates unfriendly behaviors toward students … to have the students dehumanized by policies designed simply to increase the arbitrary rankings… undermines the mission of educating our youth,” the NACAC report says.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves. …” Cassius said in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”
The universities still teach “Julius Caesar,” don’t they?
