The arrival of a new set of college rankings for the academic year marks a new round of colleges jockeying to claim increases in their rankings and prospective students studying the rankings for changes. But such students, and society as a whole, should be cautioned against outsourcing their due diligence research of colleges to the rankings industry, as the industry relies on many metrics that have nothing to do with the quality of education provided or what a university can offer students for specific circumstances.
High-ranking prestigious universities disproportionately favor rich students more than any other factor. It has long been known that students from richer backgrounds tend to get higher standardized test scores, receive academic coaching and end up applying at all. A large study by Opportunity Insights using tax returns and anonymized admissions data from many universities found that, as a result, children of the richest families were much more likely to be admitted even after taking all the advantages of privilege into account. This makes being rich a qualification of its own. This research demonstrates that students attending highly selective colleges are not the hardest workers or the winners of a meritocratic system but were rather the winners of a luck-based system, which begs the question of whether these institutions actually provide a substantially superior education to other institutions.
The same study compared data from waitlisted students (students who had the potential to be accepted but the school did not have enough space for) who were later accepted and those who ultimately attended other institutions. On average, the study found that attending a top public flagship instead of an Ivy did not significantly increase income, but an Ivy does increase a student’s chance of earning in the top 1%, further showing that the most prestigious colleges are more indicative of privilege than merit.
Although the rankings try to sell themselves as authoritative on the value different universities provide, closer examination reveals that the numbers behind their methodology are quite meaningless. As the former dean of Yale Undergraduate Admissions explains, picking a university to attend is a much more subjective and expensive decision than picking another consumer product like a vacuum cleaner. Because vacuums are commodities while colleges vary much more widely, students cannot expect the college rankings to reflect their experience with the product like a ranking of vacuum cleaners might. But as long as students continue to be deceived by the rankings, universities become incentivized to do what is best for their ranking, not the student. This is certainly proven by the methodology of U.S. News and World Report, the largest system of college rankings. For example, financial resources per student, which is the amount of money a school spends per student, is weighted at 8% In other words, 8% of rankings are determined by the size of a school’s endowment, which is more of a measurement of the influence of a few rich donors than the quality of the faculty. To improve its standing in the rankings, a college would be incentivized to increase its tuition, admit richer students who do not need financial support and make students delay admission until the spring term (U.S. News only uses fall matriculation data), all of which are contrary to pedagogical goals of education. This factor does not even precisely predict an undergraduate student’s experience at that school because “financial resources are measured by comparing an institution’s total expenditures on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services and institutional support against its total fall full-time equivalent student enrollment.” Expenditures on activities like public service, graduate student training and study abroad may be taking away funds for other activities that are of interest to individual undergraduates. On the other hand, other students interested in public service, research or study abroad may want to attend an institution that spends lavishly in those areas. Furthermore, institutions like Drexel are hurt because students on co-op are considered to be enrolled despite not being in classes. This depresses Drexel’s financial resources per student metric even though co-op is a valuable opportunity. In another example, full-time faculty salary is weighted at 6%, and proportion of full-time faculty is weighted at 3%. The focus on full-time faculty incentivizes universities to avoid utilizing adjunct faculty with extensive industry experience which would increase faculty diversity and can be especially valuable for students entering certain experience-oriented fields, such as dance. Clearly, the rankings cannot and do not accurately reflect the subjective needs of every student nor are they indicative of merit.
The illusion of prestige portrayed by the rankings brings real harm to students. Columbia University, Claremont McKenna College, Emory University, Iona College and Temple University have all been accused of attempting to deceive U.S. News and World Report with manipulated data. In Operation Varsity Blues, probably the largest college admissions scandal in US history, rich, but not ultra-rich, parents paid a college consultant to find a “side door.” He arranged for proctors to help students cheat on the SAT/ACT and bribed coaches to designate students as recruited athletes despite them not playing that sport.
Competition for prestige is fierce not just at the elite levels but also for ordinary students. Two-thirds of high school students are “often or always worried” about getting into their dream college, and the crisis has become so severe that students at high-achieving schools have been designated as a high-risk group for depression. Seeking external validation through the rankings, high schoolers lose opportunities for connection with others and their community–which the COVID pandemic demonstrated is essential for mental health–and justify many unhealthy behaviors with the belief that the benefit of prestige will be worth the sacrifices. The suffering does not end when students finally get to college. Anxiety about graduate school or future employment will follow. The consequences of the rankings system for prospective students are severe and enduring.
The zero-sum game of admissions guarantees that the college rankings cannot exist as a neutral player. Even the richest schools have finite resources and cannot accept every qualified student. They must therefore cap their class sizes. If a student is admitted, a seat at that institution has now become unavailable for all other applicants. This incentivizes fierce competition and cheating. Lower-ranked but quite qualified universities end up picking up the scraps. All universities are incentivized to cheat the rankings by deferring admission to later terms, admitting more students who can pay full sticker price or even manipulating data submitted to ranking sites. Prestigious universities fail to be the engines of social mobility if they are simply the product of cycles of privilege. The consequences of the rankings are devastating, permanent, unsustainable and filled with deception all around. Society ought to reject the rankings system and encourage students to attend a college they “fit” in, not a college with a lot of money. Success ought not be defined by U.S. News and World Report.