Colleges, not families, obsess over rankings

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, and who regularly embarrass 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.

"For Claremont, there is I would think a psychologically large difference between being ninth and 11th," said Bob Schaeffer of the group FairTest and a rankings critic. " 'We're a top 10 school,' (or) 'we're 11th or 12th' — that's a big psychological difference. It's a bragging rights difference."

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 like that reported at Claremont McKenna is, given that while U.S. News cross-checks some data with other sources, it relies largely on colleges themselves to provide it. Modest forms of fudging through data selection are undeniably common, especially in law school rankings.

The most high-profile case of outright cheating involved Iona University in New York, which acknowledged last fall submitting years of false data that boosted its ranking from around 50th in its category to 30th.

But most rankings critics say 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.

The vast majority of students attend college within three hours of home, so national rankings have little meaning. One student who went to MacGowan's office last week for a college planning meeting, junior Bridget Gillis, said she'd yet to even see a college ranking guide. Her criteria: "If they have my major, if it's a nice campus, how big it is, if they have the sport I want to play in college (field hockey)."

The latest version of a huge national survey of college freshmen conducted annually by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute asked students to list various factors affecting their choice of college. Rankings in national magazines were No. 11 for current college freshmen, with roughly one in six calling them very important, well behind such factors as cost, size and location.

Those findings may be somewhat misleading. The leading factor cited, by almost two-thirds of students, was their college's "academic reputation," which can be hard to disentangle from its ranking. A reputational survey ranking accounts for 25 percent of a college's score in U.S. News, and fame from a high U.S. News ranking contributes to reputation, even if students say the ranking itself wasn't a factor.