Clemson Staffer Outlines College Rankings Manipulation 163
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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= [google.com]
It's not like this is new.
Alternatives to US News ranking (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It explains a lot (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to Yale so my biases may be showing but even in high school I never knew many students who paid that much attention to rankings when they were considering what schools to go to. It might make a difference if two schools were very far apart in the rankings but that was pretty much it. I And even then, that would simply be a proxy for one being a better school. Far more people cared either about the academics, the scholarships offered, and the location than anything else.
My impression is that the laws schools care a lot more about the rankings and that it influences people a lot more about where they are applying. (Not surprisingly one seems to see a lot more manipulation of the law school rankings than the undergraduate rankings). This care might be coming in part from the fact that employers such as law firms apparently care about the rankings for deciding whom to hire.
All of that said, if a ranking difference plays only a small weight on students' decisions it could still impact a lot of the students who were making knifeedge decisions about whether or not to go to a specific school.
Re:Schools == Business (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Playboy's Top Party Schools (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Here's a way that my College cheated a ranking... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Same thing happens with Law Schools (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Same thing happens with Law Schools (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Raise your hand (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems to be what happens when you introduce greed into a system. If education was free and universities were more specialised it may reduce this, still, the greed factor will always affect the system.
Maybe I'm too altruistic and this clouds my judgment of others, but I'd like to think that if there was equality of education there'd be less chance of greed in the system.
Re:It explains a lot (Score:1, Interesting)
I've always wondered about these rankings. If you get into Harvard, aren't you pretty much going to go there, regardless of whether it is 1st, 2nd or 15th on the school rankings. And doesn't the same go with most Ivy League schools, as well as schools like Stanford, MIT, and a few others.
FWIW, Harvard offered me a full ride, and Stanford and MIT couldn't wait to get their hands on me. I ended up going to a small private uni.
Granted, rankings had nothing to do with it, but your generalization there kinda annoyed me.
Think that's bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm at a University in the UK. There are many students here on the MSc Computer Science scheme that can not program. Any language. At all. One of the group-work programming modules has been altered this year, so that rather than programming a solution, students can use Access / Excel / Word to produce the prototype of their 'system'. And as students might not find that easy, rather than do a presentation demo-ing their work, they can instead videotape the demo, allowing for smoke and mirrors tricks.
We have students with 80%+ plagiarism according to TurnItIn, and being let off with a slap on the wrist due to "cultural differences".
We have a Professors of Multimedia who can only code a web page when using Word 2003, and requires help opening Visual Studio solution files. We have lecturers who write down which files need to be moved to which folders, because they have yet to master drag and drop in Windows...
On the other hand, we have lecturers who are experts in their field. We have some young, highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic lecturers who know their subject inside out, yet don't for a second come across as arrogant. Who continue to be told "If we achieve less than 80% pass-rate on your module, it's your fault for not teaching the subject properly" despite the powers-that-be allowing students onto the degree who clearly have no skill with computers, whose only contribution to the School is 3x the normal annual fee.
The good lecturers get more work put upon them. The crap lecturers have told the-powers-that-be to sod off... so they are not given extra work any more. This gives them more time for leisure, recreation, and outside pursuits.
Sorry to rant... but for all the crap, I do love my University. I just wish the Executive, the Dean, the Associate Deans, and the Senior Lecturers cared enough to do something about it.
They don't.
Is the USNews Model good? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Schools == Business (Score:3, Interesting)
However NYU does do very well with fundraising. It also doesn't hurt that their undergraduate tuition is obscenely expensive (more than double what I pay).
My college, on the other hand, graduates huge numbers of peace corps volunteers, teachers, and professors, and is (barely) funded by the state.
Naturally, we take a big hit on US News' endowment rankings, which allegedly hold an enormous weight on the overall ranking. However, although a few of our buildings could use a fresh coat of paint, we seem to do just fine without a 2.5billion endowment.
(I shouldn't knock NYU too much. Their Law and Business programs are indeed among the top of their fields, as the GP indicated. Their fine/performing arts program is also top-notch, and certainly doesn't produce many (any?) high-earners (although I do suppose such a program might attract a certain kind of high-rolling donor, if we're going to be throwing uninformed accusations around). Arts & Sciences at NYU, however, do tend to be generally unremarkable compared to the "flagship" programs, and certainly not worth $60 Grand a year)
Law School Manipulations (Score:4, Interesting)
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).