Ranking Secrets Revealed!

College rankings are an interesting business, if for no other reason than the public loves them and the higher education intelligentsia hates them. Take the ongoing scandal at Clemson University. When it came out recently that Clemson has made increasing its US News & World Report ranking from 38 to the top 20 its sole focus, it provoked gasps and outrage in the higher education world, but barely a ripple elsewhere. To be sure, the stunts Clemson has pulled are pretty outrageous and do little to enhance the instituton's quality, but rankings are here to stay; the only question still in doubt is whether those rankings will reflect things that actually matter.

Clemson's actions are all quite rational given the incentive structure colleges currently operate under. The state of South Carolina provides little oversight to its public colleges and universities, and the federal government has few levers to demand quality. That leaves individual institutions to determine their own measures of success, and Clemson found a numeric benchmark on which it could measure itself: college rankings. The ranking magazines sell millions of copies each year, which drive applications, which in turn boosts prestige. If you're Clemson, you'd be a fool not to do everything in your power to increase your ranking.

And that's exactly what they did, in pretty stark ways. US News gives a large preference to class sizes between 1-19 students, so Clemson did everything in its power to reduce classes that were in the 20-25 range down to the magic number of 19. In turn, Clemson let every class over 50 students grow indefinitely. The magazine didn't value average or median class size--it valued the percentage under 20 and the percentage over 50. Nevermind that no good research would suggest that's in the best interests of students.

Next, because the rankings value wealth and exclusivity, Clemson raised tuition sharply and sought to increase the academic credentials of its incoming students. South Carolina is a poor state with low educational attainment; Clemson's policies made it more elite and less accessible to first-generation, minority, and low-income students.

The thing that's so galling about all this is what comes next. Despite constant criticism and constructive suggestions on how to improve, US News continues to give 25 percent weight to a peer assessment survey that's really nothing more than a measure of fame. This is by far the single most important category in the rankings, and Clemson, pursuing its own best interests, deliberately scored its peers lower. InsideHigherEd found Clemson President James F. Barker's survey response, and he rated Clemson as the best university in the country, above the likes of UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale.

There are two things that continue to baffle me about all this. One, that the magazine continues to use such a flawed measure when it's in every institution's best interests to rate other ones poorly. The surveys are based purely on reputation and have next to nothing to do with quality. Two, that institutions have not seized the opportunity to create something better. They've focused mainly on attacking rankings themselves rather than seeing that the American public wants some objective system to evaluate colleges and universities, a system that would fairly evaluate how well a college educates the students it starts with. Until we get something better, we're left with glossy, silly, status-based nonsense. Institutions, act accordingly.