College Rankings for Fun and Profit

InsideHigherEd reports that the President of Arizona State University will get a financial bonus if ASU climbs in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. If the rankings were based on measures that actually had anything to do with student learning, this might not be a bad idea. But as it stands, the most likely outcome will be to further drive up student costs. Why? Because of the way the U.S. News rankings are constructed.

95% of the rankings are based on measures that are, in whole or in part, a function of three things: wealth, prestige, and selectivity. Prestige is tough to change in higher education; institutional reputations are all but written in stone and difficult to move. Increasing selectivity can also be challenge, particularly for big state universities like ASU, because the pool of students to recruit is fixed, and because state legislatures don't like angry calls from taxpayers wanting to know why they're supporting public universities their kids can't get into.

Wealth, on the other hand, you can always get more of. So if the ASU President wants to earn his rankings bonus, the smartest course would be to spend every waking moment on the phone hitting up rich alumni for donations, and to figure out a way to raise tuition as much as possible. Then he should spend all that new money on...well, on anything really, it doesn't much matter what. If spending goes up, the U.S. News rankings will go up too, irrespective of whether the money is spent well.