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.

Claremont McKenna College recently announced that it had been sending inflated SAT scores to US News since 2005.

According to news accounts, the vice president and dean of admissions admitted inflating the scores and resigned. The college’s critical reading scores were inflated by an average of 17 points and the math scores were bumped up by an average of 10.5 points.   Here is where you can find a detailed explanation of the manipulation.

Other Colleges Being Deceitful

Claremont McKenna is hardly the only school that has fudged, or in some cases, falsified its numbers. Baylor University, for instance, essentially bribed its incoming freshmen one year into retaking the SAT. The freshmen were already admitted to Baylor so there was no reason to revisit the test. Baylor’s stunt, which managed to boost the school’s average SAT score by 10 points, triggered a huge outcry.

The U.S. Naval Academy was embarrassed when it became public that its applicant rejection rate wasn’t nearly as high as the institution was reporting. At an industry conference, a Clemson University administrator shared a laundry list of ways that her institution was manipulating its figures to boost its college rankings. What prompted gasps from the audience was the administrator’s observation that Clemson rated all other schools in US News’ survey as below average to make it look better.

Schools also falsify the number of their full-time faculty. I did a story in 2009 for my college blog at CBS MoneyWatch that illustrated that schools, in this case the most elite of institutions, gave US News the wrong figures on the percentage of its faculty who were full-time. Here is an excerpt:

You can read my entire post here:  Are Ivy League Schools Fudging Their Numbers?

Despite what US News, which isn’t even a magazine anymore, might suggest, colleges and universities are on the honor system when submitting data.  In a New York Times article yesterday, Robert Morse, who heads up US News’ rankings operation, said he has a team of four to six people reviewing the data. Hmmmm. Really Bob? Really?

Here’s the Real Scandal

In my opinion, the biggest news isn’t that schools are obsessed with looking better in the rankings, but what the rankings have done to our higher-ed system. In pursuit of rankings glory, schools across the country have adopted policies about how they spend their money, whom they admit, and what kind of financial aid they distribute that have negatively impacted millions of American families. Now that’s the real scandal!

I’ll write more about this tomorrow.

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 what you need to know about  college rankings.

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

Should colleges be evaluated more like baseball players?

I’m raising this question today because the St. Louis Cardinals are going to the World Series!

I had the good fortune of growing up in the 1960s in St. Louis when the Cardinals made it to the World Series three times. Among my fondest childhood memories was being able to watch the World Series in grade school in ’64, ’67 and ’68. Our teachers made us remain in our desks, but we got to push them as close to the black-and-white TV as we could. It was thrilling.

Moneyball and College

If you’ve read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, one of my favorite writers, or the movie version starring Brad Pitt, you might understand where I’m going with the question about colleges and baseball.

Moneyball tells the story of the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest baseball teams, which has to compete against mega-rich teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox. Billy Beane, the A’s general manager, decided that the  way to succeed was to discount the conventional wisdom about what makes baseball players worth the investment. Let the Yankees spend the big bucks, the A’s would use a highly unorthodox way to find inexpensive gems who were undervalued by everybody else.

The A’s adopted a method first created by Bill James, a baseball genius and statistician. James, who once was a security guard at a baked beans factory in Lawrence, KS, developed sabermetrics that uses statistical analysis to evaluate baseball players that can be more effective than the traditional ways of picking talent.

Beane hired a young Yale economics whiz to start running the numbers and they immediately began clashing with the team’s old-fashioned scouts, who had their own hidebound ways to picking talent.  In the movie, one A’s scout even suggested that a player lacked confidence because he had an ugly girlfriend.

The team that Beane assembled managed to win 20 games in a row, which remains a American League record and they ended up in the playoffs. Today baseball teams routinely use sabermetric methods to evaluate players.

Evaluating Colleges Like Baseball Players

Okay, so what does this have to do with baseball?

Ryan Craig, a partner in University Ventures Fund, argues that colleges should start using a higher-ed equivalent of sabermetrics to determine if colleges are doing their job. Craig wrote an essay in Inside Higher Ed, that argues that colleges are measuring the wrong things when they attempt to determine how (un)successful they are. Here is a portion of what he wrote:

Evaluating Colleges the Moneyball Way

I think it’s only a matter of time before there will be a demand from the government, foundations, consumer advocates and elsewhere for meaningful statistics that will help families evaluate whether a particular college or university is worth the investment. With the right data, the higher-ed version of Billy Beane will be able to determine the on-base percentage equivalent for higher education. And frankly the day that schools can no longer hide behind their rankings, fancy buildings and research reputation can’t come soon enough!

More from The College Solution

4 Ways to Cut the Cost of an Out-of-State University

What is Your Expected Family Contribution?

Where Most Students End Up Attending College

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

I’ve been in New Orleans this week attending the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

At the conference I’ve been doing short interviews with college experts whom I think you’ll enjoy hearing from. I’m going to start out today with an interview that I conducted with Robert Morse, who is the man behind US News & World Report’s college rankings.

Do you love the college rankings or hate them? How do you think families should use the rankings? I’d love to hear what you think by using the comment box below.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of  her newly updated workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College and she also writes college blogs for CBSMoneyWatch and US News & World Report.

Last week US News & World Report unveiled its 2012 college rankings to the usual fanfare.

What typically gets overlooked during the annual rankings season are the schools that aren’t media darlings. During last year’s ranking season, I devoted a post to these overlooked schools. I want to share what I wrote again because I think it is helpful to students who are never going to get anywhere close to the Harvard’s of the world.

Schools in the Rankings Basement

Today I want to focus on the schools that never get to bask in the bright lights of the college rankings hoopla. I’m talking about the colleges and universities that are at or near the bottom of the rankings.

I started my college career at one of those schools. I attended the University of Missouri—St. Louis, which is a commuter school that isn’t particularly selective and its graduation rates could definitely use improvement. According to U.S. News‘s latest stats, 30.5 percent of its freshmen don’t return for a second year. Only 41 percent graduate in six years.

UMSL happened to be 1.5 blocks from my home. The deal that my parents cut with my four siblings and me was that they would pick up the entire tab if we went to UMSL, which offered an affordable education. If UMSL didn’t have our intended major, mom and dad would pay for us to attend another University of Missouri campus.

I had a wonderful experience at UMSL as a history major and it was at this school that I discovered my passion for journalism. For my junior year, I transferred to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where I was equally happy. If I hadn’t attended UMSL, I might never have stumbled into a career that I’ve enjoyed for more than 30 years.

If you end up attending a poorly ranked school, I wouldn’t stress about it. It’s important to go to a college that’s a good fit for you, even if it’s not at the top of a rankings list. Besides, it’s what you do in college that matters, not where you go.

Getting the Most From Any College

So for all of you out there heading to schools with rankings in the basement, here are 4 tips:

1. Get involved.

The reason why I am a journalist today is because I vowed that I wasn’t going to be “just a number” at UMSL. I was particularly worried about that because I had attended a small girls’ high school. I ran for student government (and won) and signed up to write for the student newspaper and discovered that I really liked writing.

2. Seek out professors.

At big universities it’s going to be more difficult, but it’s certainly doable to reach out to professors. At UMSL, I connected with a professor there, who believed in me and convinced me that I had a writing talent.

3. Keep your eye on the clock.

One of the knocks against the lower-tier schools is their low graduation rates. These schools often don’t enjoy the resources that the top schools enjoy. That’s why it’s even more important that you consult an adviser every semester to make sure that you are taking the right classes and are on track to graduate on time.

4. Check out tutors.

You will reduce your chances of receiving poor grades if you take advantage of the free tutors that universities routinely provide. And if your school has a writing center, use it. Even “A” students in high school can often use some extra help at the college level. Also try to join study groups.

Here’s the bottom line:

Don’t forget that where you end up going to college isn’t nearly as important as earning a college degree.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes college blogs for CBSMoneyWatch and US News & World Report.

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of US News and World Report’s college rankings even though I write a college blog for the magazine.  The methodology is flawed and the rankings sponsor does not try to measure what kind of education students receive at their schools. What I find even more troubling is the fact that  college rankings have encouraged colleges to behave very badly.

I’m bringing this up today because US News has just released its 2012 college rankings. Surprise, surprise. According to US News, Harvard University is the No. 1 ranked university and Williams College is the top dog among liberal arts colleges.

I thought I’d use the latest college rankings release as an opportunity to share just one of my pet peeves with US News’ college rankings. The magazine’s college rankings amount to a strange beauty contest.

Reputation plays a heavy role in deciding who will be the alpha dogs in the US News & World Report’s college rankings and who will be the mutts. That’s a major reason why the schools that enjoy a great reputation – deserved or not – monopolize the top rankings spots. Reputation had traditionally accounted for 25% of a college or university’s ranking.  How the magazine determines reputation is crazy.

How is a College Doing on a Scale of 1 to 5?

Every year, the magazine sends out three surveys to each institution in a particular category, such as national universities or liberal arts colleges. Three administrators in the office of the president, admissions and provost are supposed to fill out the surveys. The folks stuck with this chore are expected to grade each of their peers on a 1-to-5 scale. The best score is a 5 and the worst is a 1.

Any guess which schools get a heap of 5 scores?’ Beyond the automatic high scores of some schools and the crappy scores of others, what has always irked me is that universities and colleges are supposed to know what’s going on at their “peer” institutions and that’s impossible. You can’t tell me, for instance, that administrators at the University of Wisconsin can assess the academic quality of hundreds of its peers including Georgia State, University of Missouri, University of Chicago, Rutgers, MIT, San Diego State and the College of William & Mary.

Changing the College Ranking Reputation Scores

The magazine has deservedly received a lot of flack for basing so much of its ranking on these dubious reputation assessments. I suppose that’s one reason why the magazine dropped the reputation rating down slightly to 22.5% of the total score for its 2011 rankings roll-out. The magazine also shrunk the opinions of the schools themselves to 15% and it added the opinions of high school counselors (7.5%).

Frankly, I don’t think high school counselors are in any better position to measure the reputation of individual schools across the country.   Many counselors know little about the schools outside their own state. In fact, they may know little about schools beyond their own state institutions – if that.

How to Use the Rankings

It’s fine to use US News & World Report’s  college rankings as a starting point to gather names of schools to consider in your college. But please don’t assume that the No. 1 school must be better than School No. 2 or No. 50 or the school ranked as 100th best. It’s up to you to evaluate what schools are best for you or your child. Sure that’s a lot harder than taking your cues from the magazine, but a heck of a lot is at stake.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes college blogs for CBSMoneyWatch and US News & World Report.

Read More:

Blaming College Rankings for Runaway College Costs

What Ever Happened to Shakespeare?

4 Ways to Check Out Colleges and Universities