Yesterday, in writing about the latest college rankings scandal on my college blog, I mentioned that the institutional pursuit of college rankings glory, has hurt millions of students in ways they can’t even imagine. Today I want to elaborate on that observation.

If you missed yesterday’s post, here it is:

Colleges and Universities That Cheat

Millions of students are adversely impacted by the rankings competition because of the actions of the audience that cares most deeply about the numbers – college presidents and their boards of trustees, and by extension, their admission offices. For these folks, US News has provided them with an easy (though deeply flawed) scorecard to measure how their institutions are faring and they are distraught if their school’s ranking stalls out, or worse, drops.

What the Rankings Don’t Measure!

Perhaps aggressive pursuit of higher rankings wouldn’t be a bad thing if the rankings actually measured what sort of job a college or university was doing to educate its undergrads. One of the perverse aspects about the rankings is that turning out thoughtful, articulate young men and women, who can write cogently and think critically won’t budge a school’s ranking up even one spot. Curiously enough, U.S. News doesn’t even attempt to measure the type of learning going on at schools.

Unfortunately, the methodology fueling the rankings are a collection of subjective measurements that students and families are supposed to rely upon to pinpoint the schools doing the best job of educating undergraduates. U.S. News relies on proxies for educational quality, but these proxies are dubious at best.

 Colleges Behaving Badly

Here are just three of the ways that the rankings hurt students and their parents:

1. Rankings encourage colleges to favor affluent students.

Many teenagers end up as collateral damage in the rankings race because schools that are more selective are rated higher, which encourages them to accept more wealthy students. US News awards schools which generate higher test scores and grade point averages from their freshmen. This focus on selectivity has been a boon for affluent high school students, who tend to enjoy better academic profiles. These teens can afford expensive test-prep courses and are more likely to have attended schools with stronger academic offerings. There is a strong positive correlation between standardized test scores and family income.

Before the rankings became so prominent, rich students typically had to pay full price for college. The majority of grants were reserved for middle-class and low-income students, who required financial help. But with the rankings premium linked to top students, private and public institutions began offering merit scholarships to entice smart, wealthy students to their campuses rather than to their competitors. How do you cough up the money for these deal sweeteners? One way is to raise the tuition price to generate extra revenue for these scholarships and another way is to reduce the financial aid to needy students.

The only schools that don’t offer merit scholarships to rich students are the institutions that don’t have to. Wealthy parents whose children get into Harvard or Swarthmore will be happy to write checks worth a quarter of a million dollars or more. The most elite schools boast that they reserve their aid to the families who need financial help to attend college, but most of these institutions offer admissions to a shamefully low percentage of needy students.

2. Rankings encourage admission tricks

US News’ algorithm also favors schools that spurn more students. To increase their rejection rates, some schools will court students through marketing materials and social media that they have no intention of accepting. Here’s another trick: some institutions have made it easy for students to apply via streamlined online applications, which are referred to in the industry as “fast apps.” Schools use this strategy to increase the size of their student body, as well as bump up their rejection rates.

3. Rankings encourage debt.

Sadly, what the rankings giant ignores is how much debt students are incurring at their schools. It’s a terrible omission that is certainly one reason why college tuition continues to defy inflation. US News rewards schools that spend freely and the rankings juggernaut doesn’t care if that requires universities to boost their prices and graduate students with staggering debt.

I wrote a longer post about this phenomenon last year for my CBS MoneyWatch college blog. Here is the link:

Blaming College Rankings for Runaway College Costs

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a fascinating article for The New Yorker last year on college rankings in which he talked about the incentive of institutions to turn their campuses into lavish palaces and stick the bill with the kids:

Finally, I’d urge you to read an article in the Washington Monthly that focuses on George Washington University, one of the countless schools that’s been guilty of this bad behavior. Here is the link:

The Prestige Racket

Read more on The College Solution:

Yawn, Harvard is No. 1 University, But Who Is Always No. 3?

Why US News’ College Rankings Are a Joke

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and She also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter.

Join Me at My College Workshop on Saturday!

There are a few slots left for the college workshop that I will be  holding at the University of California, San Diego this Saturday (Feb. 4). At the Finding the Right College Workshop, you will learn specific strategies to increase your child’s admission chances, ways to evaluate colleges and universities, essential ACT and SAT information and, yes,  what you need to know about  college rankings!

You can learn more here and sign up for the workshop here.

I don’t have to tell you that one of the biggest stresses of the entire college process is the standardized testing. The prospects of taking the SAT and/or ACT is daunting, particularly since so much can ride on the results. I resented the amount of time and money spent in my house on these darn tests for my own two kids.

Time and money – and many families don’t have it to spend – won’t raise the test scores for everybody. When that happens, however, there are plenty of great colleges and universities that don’t require that students submit their test scores. As you’ll see from the list, a significant number of liberal arts colleges are test optional. In fact, more than a third of the top liberal arts colleges in the country fall into this category.

FairTest, a nonprofit that helps schools adopt a test-optional policy, sent me an updated list of colleges this week that I’m passing along to you. There are well over 800 schools that don’t require test scores, but many of them have easy admission policies. The schools you’ll see below are highly selective or selective schools.

The schools above that are test flexible require some type of test scores, such as Advanced Placement or SAT subject tests, in lieu of the regular ACT or SAT.

 

Test-optional schools

Find Out More

To learn more about test-optional practices, I’d suggest you read this article that I wrote for The New York Times a couple of summers ago:

The Other Side of Test Optional

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of Shrinking the Cost of College, a workbook available on her website. She also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. On Twitter follow her @CollegeBlogs.

Read More:

5 Hardest and Easiest College Majors by GPA’s

Grade Inflation: Colleges With the Easiest and Hardest Grades

Engineering Degrees: How Tough Is It To Get One

8 Reasons Not to Get a Business Degree

Should professors work as hard as many of the rest of us?

If you compare the sort of work week and vacation time that many professors enjoy with other highly educated professionals, you could conclude that there are a lot of slackers hanging out in the Ivory Towers.

I hope that professor productivity becomes a big issue with the published costs of college continuing to rise. Pushing university professors back into the classroom could certainly help reduce expenses and also benefit students who are too often taught by graduate students. There is a story in today’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education that focuses on this issue:

How to Justify Our Paychecks

I remember reading a history of the University of California system once and I was shocked when I discovered that decades ago professors at the University of California, Berkeley used to conduct their research on the weekends and during the work week they taught students. Today plenty of professors at Berkeley and many other research universities conduct their research during the week and rarely, if ever, teach undergrads.

Coincidentally, I wrote a post yesterday for my other college blog over at CBS MoneyWatch on this very issue of professor productivity. I am sharing an excerpt here that mentions a study conducted by The Center for College Productivity and Affordability, a higher-ed think tank, that examined workload data from the University of Texas at Austin that suggests that many professors aren’t teaching much nor conducting much research.  Here is the link to my post and an excerpt:

Is Toilet Paper More Valuable Than Professor Research?

After analyzing the preliminary numbers, The Center for College Productivity and Affordability argued that if professors were made to work as hard as many other Americans, college costs could shrink dramatically. In fact, according to the center’s calculations, tuition at the University of Texas could be slashed by 50% if the 80% of professors with the lightest teaching loads had to  teach a mere 150 to 160 students a year.  That doesn’t sound too tough.

What’s More Useful: Research or Charmin?

Apologists for professors counter that academics need copious amounts of free time to conduct research.  At universities, there is a widespread belief that research is far more valuable than teaching Biology 101 to a lecture hall stuffed with hundreds of freshmen.

This is actually the mindset of academia. Professors are evaluated by what kind of research grants they get and how many research papers they can crank out. Research leads to tenure. In contrast, teaching undergrads, much less being an excellent teacher, doesn’t get professors anywhere. In this sort of environment, professors spend more time avoiding undergrads than teaching them.

Disposable Research?

Much of this hallowed research, however, is less essential than the toilet paper in your own bathroom. All of us use toilet paper everyday, but very few people ever read, much less benefit from the busy-work research that many professors are generating.

The Ivory Tower is drowning in research papers that nobody needs. You can learn more about this sad phenomenon by reading this article written by leading academics in The Chronicle of Higher Education: We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research. And here’s another one that focuses on academia’s shortsighted worship of research: Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research.

Would research, whether it’s mediocre or brilliant, be threatened if profs had to spend time in classrooms? Hardly. According to the Center for College Productivity and Affordability’s report, 99.8% of the research grant money at the University of Texas was brought in by a mere 20% of the faculty.

Are you wondering, as I am, what professors, who aren’t doing much research or teaching, are doing with their time after they’ve finished the daily New York Times’ puzzle?

Read More:

You can read the rest of my CBS MoneyWatch post on professors here:

Is Toilet Paper More Valuable Than Professor Research?

Sports Illustrated and CBS has teamed up to produce an alarming special report that attempts to answer this question:  Special Report: Criminal Records in College Football.

In putting together this series, SI and CBS conducted 7,030 background checks on 2,837 players who were on the rosters of SI’s 2010 preseason top 25 teams. The investigation revealed that roughly 7% of football players on these 25 teams had been in trouble with the law either before or after entering college.

More than 200 players had criminal records that stemmed from 277 incidences. The numbers would certainly been higher but the media outlets couldn’t obtain juvenile records in most states, which posed particular problems for checking backgrounds of young men in California and Texas, which produce lots of football players.

The players’ crimes or alleged offenses included sex crimes, drug and alcohol offenses, robbery, burglary, grand theft, domestic violence, assault and more.

Top 25 Footballs Teams in 2010 Preseason

It’s shocking how many players with criminal records are playing for some of the universities which were on Sports Illustrated’s list of  the top 25 football teams before the 2010 season began. Here are the schools with the number of players with criminal records:

1. Pittsburgh (22)
2. Iowa (18)
3. Arkansas (18)
4. Boise State (16)
5. Penn State (16)
6. Virginia Tech (13)
7. Wisconsin (9)
8. Oklahoma (9)
9. Florida State (9)
10. Miami (8)
11. Ohio State (7)
12. Florida (7)
13. Oregon (7)
14. USC  (7)
15. Alabama (5)
16. North Carolina (5)
17. Cincinnati (5)
18. Utah (5)
19. Nebraska (4)
20. Georgia Tech (4)
21. Oregon State (4)
22. Louisiana State (3)
23. Texas (2)
24. Stanford (1)
25. Texas Christian (0)

Considering all the insignificant things that the NCAA makes a huge deal out of, you’d think that this would have been an issue they addressed long ago. How about requiring schools to conduct background checks on prospects before they are admitted? That would be a good start.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

I still am not sure what happened, but the host shut down my site after discovering what it termed “excessive activity.” This activity wasn’t coming from me. Someone might have been trying to break into my blog via WordPress and the host shut the whole thing down.

Since yesterday I have switched my blog to a new host and I also have a new webmaster. The site is still experiencing some weird glitches, but I’m getting those resolved. I was a nervous wreck since yesterday morning, but I am happy that this is behind me. I think we’ll open a bottle of champagne that I got as a Christmas gift tonight to celebrate.

Thanks for your patience and I will be back to posting my regular college missives soon!

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter.

This might seem like a silly question, but cobbling together a degree after taking virtual classes at different institutions might not seem so far-fetched in the future.

A fascinating article in the latest issue of Fast Company Magazine, entitled How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education, raised this and many other possibilities for higher education, which has been incredibly resistant to change through technology.

Many colleges are loath to embrace all the possibilities that technology offers, but brilliant edupunks are scoffing at this intransigence as they pursue new and cheaper ways to educate Americans. One of these visionaries is Jim Groom, who is an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington and a prominent critic of the higher-ed status quo. Here’s what he said:

Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies.

If you think this is an isolated complaint from some higher-ed techies, think again. What’s being called the open-education movement has gotten $68 million from the Hewlett Foundation alone and hungry venture capitalists are circling the ivory towers.

I can’t do justice to all the predictions that you’ll find in the Fast Company article, you’ll just have to check it out.

Further reading:  A few months ago, I wrote a post on MIT’s open courseware that touches upon one tiny aspect of how colleges can use technology to tear down their walls.

 -Lynn O’Shaughnessy, the author of The College Solution.