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The post U.S. News and World Report 2012 Rankings first appeared on Great College Advice.

The fact is that these rankings are sometimes manipulated by students on campuses. For example, there is some indication that Penn State students pushed one another on various Facebook groups to vote for their school (the rankings are derived from online student surveys).

Are these rankings valid? Probably not, in a statistical sense. And as I have said, nearly every college is a party school in one sense or another.

But the folks at Princeton Review do point out that the schools at the top of the party school list have been fairly consistent over time.  (There also is quite a lot of overlap between Playboy‘s list and the Princeton Review‘s list).  They also point to the fact that Brigham Young University has been at the top of their “Stone Cold Sober” list for 12 years in a row. So perhaps there is a grain of truth in these rankings.

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These rankings bug me.  As an educational consultant, I am constantly having to explain that these rankings are at best imperfect measures of institutional quality and at worst amount to a completely misleading popularity contest.  Just today I am having to respond to a client’s whining that the universities I am suggesting are “too far down the league tables” (to which I might respond:  “so how come you didn’t think of that when you were preparing for your algebra final”).  My client doesn’t want to listen to any reasoned argument that the quality of education that an individual student received in the classroom has little or no bearing on the the league tables presented in US News.  Needless to say, it’s going to be an interesting day.

What has me looking up, however, is the fact that a former institutional researcher at Clemson gave a presentation at the Association of Institutional Research that revealed in great detail the strategies that Clemson administrators were using to lift Clemson in the US News rankings.  And the participants–other institutional researchers from other universities who also report data to US News–where shocked.  Shocked, I say.

You can read the article yourself:  Doug Lederer is a great writer and the article is balanced.

The funny thing (okay, well, it’s really not so hilarious–it’s more funny-peculiar) is that colleges and universities bash the ratings when they’re  down, and then post them on their websites anytime their name is mentioned favorably in those same rankings.

Everyone wants “proof” that the quality of their educational product is somehow good–better than their peers–more worthy of your consumer dollar.  Yet colleges and universities know that the measures developed by US News are flawed.  They know that they measure institutional inputs and not educational outcomes.  They know that statistics like student-to-faculty ratios are misleading.

Still, the college administrators slavishly report their data to the magazine editors–with or without manipulation or “influencing” the data.  They know it’s a stupid game, but they play it anyway.  And clearly Clemson has the rules down pat.

As Marcellus uttered in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, something is rotten–not in Denmark–but in American higher education.

I do understand this quest for some sort of evaluation system that will help us compare one college against the next so that we can make better decisions about which college is best for which kids.  But we don’t need US News & World Reports.  We need Consumer Reports.

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But as long as public rankings of colleges and universities, such as those issue by US News & World Report, it’s unlikely that colleges will dump their dependence on scores any time soon.

Baylor University is now paying its accepted students to retake the SAT.  The stated aim is to encourage students to improve their scores and thereby be eligible for more scholarship aid.  But the ploy also helps move Baylor’s average SAT score up a notch or two.  And in the world of rankings, a notch or two is significant.

Here’s how it works at Baylor.  Admissions and financial aid folks at Baylor contact accepted students telling them that if they retake the SAT, they will receive a $300 credit the campus bookstore. If students raised their scores by 50 points, they would receive a $1000 scholarship.  Moreover, students who raised their scores above predetermined cut-off points for certain merit scholarships, they would then be eligible or thousands more dollars in scholarships.

The plan worked.  Over 800 students retook the SAT, about 150 received the $1000 scholarship for raising scores by 50 points or more, and 177 boosted their scores over the merit hump and pulled down another $450,000 in scholarships.  And (surprise!) Baylor’s average SAT score went up by 10 points.

You see, when it comes to the use of SAT and ACT scores in the admissions process, we have something of a vicious circle.  Even though virtually everyone agrees that there is no adequate proof that these scores predict college success or measure intelligence or aptitude, we can’t seem to get rid of them.  Why not?

Colleges, especially selective ones, find the short-hand numbers provided by the score a convenient sorting tool.

Reading applications more carefully and devising more personal or holistic admissions procedures takes time–and probably will cost more–if more staff people are required  to actually read every single application more carefully.

While everyone moans about the rankings, every rankings organization uses the scores as one important measure of a college’s selectivity and quality.

Colleges in the middle or bottom of rankings heap tend to be the ones most willing to abandon the scores as an admissions tool.  What is the incentive for Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to stop using the test scores in admissions?  (Besides, with their huge volumes of applications, these are the schools that depend on scores more heavily in assigning each application a number (the “academic index,” based on test scores and class rank).  Still, even schools like Baylor with very average SAT scores, aspire to be considered premier academic institutions.  And this aspiration depends, in part, on becoming more selective–a measure that depends, in large part, on average test scores of admitted students.

So this the problem:  no matter how much we all detest the SAT and ACT scores, it’s devilishly hard to get rid of them.

Rankings organizations will not drop their use of the test scores, because what other “objective” measure of quality could replace them?  At least scores are something easily compared across institutions.  It’s much harder to actually compare more important variables, such as quality of teaching, student learning outcomes, or “return on investment.”

It’s hard to know whether Baylor’s cynical ploy to raise its average SAT scores will become a wave of the future.  Most everyone in the business seems shocked and appalled by their practice of buying better SAT scores.

But it’s not difficult to understand the incentives, and to understand why the admissions and financial aid offices acted the way they did.  To become a highly-ranked, world class university, those average test scores had better be as high as they can be.  In the rankings game, nothing else matters as much as the numbers.

My guess is that while other admissions directors are busy condemning Baylor’s decision, they’re also secretly trying to figure out how to achieve the goal without incurring the wrath of their peers.  I think they probably admire Baylor’s chutzpah more than they would like to admit.

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