Kuttner on TAP: The End of College Rankings?

The U.S. News rankings have always been suspect, and in turn they have corrupted America’s universities. Now, several major law schools have begun a boycott. This could end with the collapse of the ranking system if undergraduate schools follow. Let’s hope so.

The rankings were launched in 1983, when U.S. News and World Report, the weakest of the three major news magazines, came up with the scheme to boost visibility and profitability. Amazingly, universities cooperated. The timing was perfect. The rankings became both an emblem and an engine of the marketization of American higher education.

As innumerable critics have pointed out, the rankings use arbitrary indicators of quality, including such inherently subjective and circular criteria as reputation. But far worse than the rankings themselves is the ways colleges and universities try to game them.

One key goal is to attract applicants with elevated board scores and grade point averages, which in turn moves you up in next year’s rankings. A higher ranking then attracts more applicants and a lower ratio of admissions to applications, which moves you further up in the rankings, and then attracts still more applicants, and so on. Academic careers rise and fall based on rankings.

Since the rankings became supreme, colleges have hired entire departments devoted to gaming them. A related financial goal is to get the highest possible number of full-paying students combined with the highest academic records.

Here’s one trick to attract poor-performing rich kids whose parents can pay full freight: Since grades and board scores are counted in the rankings for students admitted in the fall but not the spring, some universities have devised the trick of creating programs abroad to stash freshmen for the fall semester, and then bring them onto the home campus in the spring semester, when their mediocre high school records do not influence the rankings.

That way, colleges can admit more kids with lower scores whose parents don’t need financial aid. This is advertised as a kind of pre-college enrichment—a gap semester. Maybe it works that way for some students; however, its design was not mainly pedagogical but aimed at manipulating the rankings.

Merit scholarships have a long history. But some colleges now use “merit aid” as a token prestigious scholarship to attract students with high scores whose parents don’t really need the help and can pay most of the full cost. This comes at the expense of deeper, need-based financial aid. All these games help explain why poor-performing affluent students are more likely to attend top-rated universities than high-performing kids from poor families.

These patterns of social class and higher education are deeply entrenched in the intergenerational inequality of American life. The irony is that universities claim to be avenues of upward mobility. Most of the things they might do to change those patterns are hard. Boycotting the U.S. News rankings should be relatively easy.