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Clemson Staffer Outlines College Rankings Manipulation
xzvf writes "A disgruntled Clemson University staffer shows how US News and World Report college rankings are manipulated. Techniques include bad-mouthing other schools, filling out applications from highly qualified students that never intended to apply, and lying about class size and professor salaries." The school, naturally, denies that anything unethical went on. The New York Times has a more detailed article, which links to this first-person account of the presentation.
Raise your hand if you are surprised that this is going on.
Seriously, with all the incentive to attract and hold onto students and the funds they bring. Who would have thought that this is all above board and regulated?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=college+rankings+corruption+&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
It's not like this is new.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
One alternative is to bow out http://web.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/college_rankings.html of the rankings game and take a principled stand as Reed College has done. One way of thinking about attending a fine school like this is that you "want to go to a school that isn't interested in selling out its education." Perhaps not surprisingly, US News didn't actually remove Reed from the rankings, they just ranked Reed (lower) with an incomplete data set. The other alternative could be called 'open source' ranking. The University and College Accountibility Network http://www.ucan-network.org/ ranks colleges in a common format, has useful information, and best of all, you don't have to buy a copy of US News to get the rankings!
Exactly. I did a case study on this when I was in college. Basically NYU is really savvy and throws all their money at things that are cheap and produce high-earning grads(Law, business, economics) while ignoring or underfunding more expensive fields that don't produce high-earners(relative to cost). It makes sense for a school that doesn't have a huge endowment like the big ivies, but at the same time, it creates an incentive for schools to ignore fields that don't produce high-earners(philosophy, history, english) or are very costly to maintain(physics, biology, nanotech, etc.)
I don't know if you ever visited MIT in the 80s. The parties were definitely off the hook, and the girls coming in from Wellesley, BU, BC, etc were pretty amazing.
One thing I recall from the MIT guys I knew -- those guys were overachievers at everything -- academics, sports, leadership, and of course, partying. My exposure was limited to guys like that, so I don't know if it applied to the rest of the student body... but you should have seen some of the fantastic hack-engineering used to hide kegs, jello pits, etc.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My College was always top on a list of Colleges that the highest percentage of alumni donating to the college after graduating. The rankings would score a college or university based on what percentage of alumni donated back to the school the first year after graduating.
My College found the simplest way to manipulate that index. Just have every single student who graduates donate one dollar back to the school and then find one or two students with extremely wealthy parents (this was not hard at my school) and have them donate thousands and thousands of dollars. This way the school would report absurd figures like "90 percent of students donated back to our school within the first year of graduating from our undergraduate program" and it would make the school look good and it would make the degree you just got look a little more prestigious. They never told the index that we only donated a dollar and were instructed to by some of administration.
And with the few giant donations from one or two individuals, the school could artificially say that the average donation was way higher than typical, while hiding the fact that it was offset by just one or two massive donations.
Other ways to cheat is hiring adjunct professors or part time professors under different titles like 'technician' or 'consultant'. This makes the percentage of full time faculty and professors look way higher than it actually is because the school hides its adjuncts under different titles. Another way they cheated the system was renaming classrooms as different titles. One of the rankings is how many classrooms on campuses have TVs/projectors/computers and if you hide the classrooms without those your percentages increase in your 'technology' score as well.
If I think of any more I'll them but these were the ones that came to mind immediately.
Though I haven't looked at any such numbers since before I went, I've heard from friends that Temple Law dropped in the ratings this year. There were other factors, too (long-time Dean retired, respected writing teacher lured away), but I suspect this is a big one. Temple has a big night program, though (whatever the opinion of the US News people) I would say they tend to the most notably ambitious and seemingly no dumber than we day students :) Most of them, after all, are working full time jobs at the same time, often in pretty challenging fields. I was a TA for some night students in my final year, and I was constantly amazed at the drive -- some of them are full-time parents *and* engineers *and* (by the way) law students. I was far too lazy for that :)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Another trick that universities use to inflate their rankings is to give free applications to students that will never get in. Artificially increase the number of applications, then easily reject all of them to lower your admission rate.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
If the US News & World Report model actually captures good things about a university, then what's wrong with attempting to match that model?
That a university tries to match what it considers a good model shouldn't be surprising. The validity of the model may be questioned. The methods to match the institution to that model may be questioned. But I don't see how attempting to get better under some model they consider good (by whatever criteria they pick) is bad.
I don't know enough about it to know if the USNews model is any good - maybe, maybe not. But I know that institutions I'm generally familiar with land about where I might expect in the rankings. Ivy leagues on top, small underfunded state colleges much lower.
Now, the claim that Clemson administrators purposefully rank other universities lower, that's a different matter. That is the most troubling claim to me in the whole bit. That action is highly unethical and I would be sorry to find out that it is true of Clemson, or anywhere for that matter.
Here's some shit law schools have done:
Last year, Berkeley (#6) sent fee waivers to a ton of underqualified students. Students who would have never applied to Berkeley because applications cost money to submit. (Hence the fee waiver.) Underqualified students apply (because why not? it's free) and get rejected. Berkeley artificially deflates their acceptance rate, which helps their ranking score. This is likely done by a ton of schools. I just know of Berkeley doing it.
Another factor that affects LS rankings is the offer acceptance rate (basically, how many students who get accepted elect to attend that instutition). Schools will frequently reject obviously overqualified candidates because "they'll decide against going here and attend Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, etc. instead." Thus, qualified students are rejected for being "too qualified."
Finally, schools like Georgetown (GULC, #14) used to admit a ton of transfer students and part-time students. Neither transfer students nor part-time students affected the LS rankings. Thus, GULC basically could accept many less qualified people, extract $100K from each of them over the next two years, use these extra millions of dollars to entice very qualified candidates to attend with generous scholarship packages (full rides and the like). Because these transfer and part-time students didn't affect the rankings, GULC was effectively using a money-generating machine to attract very qualified candidates who may otherwise have attended a more highly ranked school like Chicago. However, this year, the USNWR started including part-time students in the rankings. Transfers still aren't included.
Of course, the question remains: Does this matter all that much? When a law school like Yale or Harvard has so much money and prestige to leverage to attract the best students even if the students won't get a better classroom education there, aren't other schools equally entitled to game rankings that, at the end of the day, are pretty much bullshit anyway?
Look, I attended a top law school, but I'm willing to acknowledge that the rankings are almost completely meaningless outside of job prospects. The rankings do create some sort of "job prospect tiers." But aside from that USNWR rankings are crap (at least in law, I don't know about other fields).