“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 US 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 shower financial aid on high-achieving, and often wealthy, kids with high SAT scores.
In the mid-1990s, roughly one-third of grant aid, or scholarships colleges of all types awarded with their own money, was given on grounds other than need (typically called “merit aid’). A decade later, they gave away three times as much money — but well over half was based on merit.
Yes, some colleges recruited better students, but there was a price to be paid. Consider a 2008 study by The Institute for College Access and Success that examined the $11.2 billion annually four-year colleges were awarding in grant aid. Of that, $3.35 billion was awarded as merit aid.
That would have easily covered the $2.4 billion in unmet need-based aid that the colleges said their low-income students still faced.
Rankings critic Lloyd Thacker, founder of the group Education Conservancy, calls that a shift in financial aid from “charitable acts to competitive weapons.” Or, as Schaeffer describes it, “they end up giving the money to rich white kids.”
The vast majority of students attend college within three hours of home, so national rankings have little meaning.
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