Every year, journalists, university administrators and high school students impatiently await the release of US News & World Report university rankings to see which schools have moved up or down on the lists. This year the big news was that Columbia University abandoned from 2 to 18 US Newsranking of national universities – not because of any measurable decline in its quality, but because he had faked the data he submitted, a fact that the university itself has now admits.
Columbia isn’t the only school that has recently been caught sending fake issues to the magazine. This summer, US News removed Villanova University from its “Best Value” list for “false declaration» its data. An internal university in Southern California goodbye last spring confirmed a similar situation US News numbers-boosting program at its school of education, and a dean of Temple University’s business school is now purge sentence in prison for such activities. Other collegesincluding Tulane, Claremont McKenna, Emory and the University of Pennsylvania, have been mired in similar scandals over the past decade.
The common source of these controversies is the way in which US News gathers its metrics. Although almost any ranking, academic or otherwise, can be played, US News relies heavily on exclusive surveys and self-assessmentwhich particularly encourages colleges to cheat.
The most famous and infamous is a “reputation survey” that the magazine sends to college presidents and deans asking them to rate their fellow colleges. This survey suffers from low response rates (down to 34 percent this year, from 48 percent a decade ago), and leaders toyed with the results for years by evaluating themselves while considering everyone else to be horrible.
US News also asks colleges to follow what is called the Common dataset (CDS): Definitions and guidelines intended to standardize the reporting of data on class sizes, student-faculty ratios, and a host of other measures that the federal government does not collect. It’s a worthy effort, but compliance is voluntary, and while most colleges participate, some do not, including, until last month, Columbia University. Furthermore, it is difficult for US News to validate the accuracy of data reported by colleges.
In addition to the main list of best colleges, US News also classifies professional programs such as law, business, and education schools. All data for these rankings comes from surveys that US News sends to programs because the federal government collects little information on specific graduate programs. Vocational schools are under particularly immense pressure to move up the ladder US News rankings. It is not surprising that these programs are the source of many scandals.
The chances of being caught are low because it is difficult, if not impossible, for US News to independently confirm the data. That’s why evidence of misconduct tends to surface only when a school’s numbers seem so implausible that someone launches an investigation or when a university insider blows the whistle, as in Columbia’s case. Since reporting is inherently risky, it is highly likely that there are many more false statements at many more universities than have been revealed so far.
The way for a magazine to minimize the risk of manipulation and misinformation is not to rely on hard-to-verify proprietary data, but rather to base its rankings on information collected by the federal government. It is how THE Washington Monthly brings together its annual college rankings– and, not coincidentally, why he hasn’t been involved in the kind of scandals that have plagued US News. Federal data is, by definition, public, therefore easier for outside observers to verify. And although the federal government rarely penalizes universities that send erroneous data, schools know the risk exists.
This is not to say that universities no longer try to manipulate the numbers they report to Washington. For example, to appear as if they are catering to more low-income students, selective colleges falsify their Pell Grant admissions statistics by letting in many students who barely qualify financially. Or, they game graduation rates by integrating these students in the summer or spring rather than the fall cohort that the federal government generally uses to calculate graduation rates. But there are ways to correct this behavior. For example, the Washington Monthly calculates actual graduation rates versus predicted rates that adjust for student characteristics and household incomes. We also use a new federal graduation rate that includes part-time and transfer students.
Additionally, some of the data Washington Monthly Most of the data that studies rely on — like how much students earn after leaving college or how well they’ve paid off their student loans — can’t be manipulated by colleges because the federal government collects it independent through student loans and tax records. Other federal data Monthly Uses, such as the number of ROTC students in a college or the percentage of work-study slots it devotes to community service jobs, can only be “gamed” by colleges that do more of what we want what they do, such as encouraging students to serve. the country.
Why not US News base its ranking solely on public data, as Monthly do? The answer is that the federal government does not collect the numbers US News must calculate the qualities its rankings are supposed to reward: the wealth, prestige, and exclusivity of a college. As long as these are the values US News chooses to define collegiate excellence, its ranking will be subject to play.
There is, however, something Washington can do to partially salvage US News of himself. Elements of the Common Data Set, such as class sizes and student-faculty ratios, are of enough public interest that the federal government is considering adding them to its annual data collection from colleges. It should combine this with occasional checks of the data provided by colleges. These two steps would add a measure of integrity to the college rankings that millions of prospective students and their families rely on – and perhaps spare the rest of us from having to read so many stories about universities that make fun of others. US Newsthe eyes.
Related
