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The post The New College Rankings–An Alternative first appeared on Great College Advice.

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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The undergraduate magazine rankings, in contrast, give considerable weight to perception and tend to be based on annual assessments, as if undergraduate-program innovations or tweakings manifest significant change in two semesters. But if the objective is to sell magazines, manifesting change is important. U.S. News has artfully—in the guise of improving the veracity of its rankings—made one or more changes in its methodology every few years, which enables it to argue that there is some shift in the quality of institutions that the new methodology has captured. The cynic in me says that the changing of the methodology is more a strategy for getting different results in the rankings, which helps the publication sell more copies. If the rankings stayed constant, why buy the magazines?
Moreover, the precision that U.S. News purports its methodologies reveal is, on the face of it, rather silly. If you look at the top 10 institutions, you will see that some of them are separated by small fractions of a percent. In the Olympics, those fractions make a difference, but it’s hard to understand how in the real-life breadth of activities of a university, they make any difference at all to a student. I have talked with many people at U.S. News who share my skepticism and, in some cases, are embarrassed by the magazine’s rankings. But they recognize that the rankings are a significant moneymaker. (The magazine has created separate rankings of graduate and professional programs, as well as research hospitals, not to mention books based on the rankings.)

I admit that I do sometimes use the rankings in my research of colleges, primarily because parents often ask me how this or that college is ranked in this or that category.
But I never let the rankings dictate which colleges I may (or may not) recommend for a particular student. For each student, there may be any number of great colleges that will amply fill their needs and aspirations.
First I get to know those needs and aspirations. Then I recommend colleges that will best suit the individual student.

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1. According to Robert Morse, who leads the rankings project at US News, it might be survey fatigue: colleges are tired of filling out forms for all the various publications who are now entering the ratings game.
2. Morse says it might also be competing priorities on campuses: they are busy dealing with enrollment and financial aid matters and other affairs, and too busy to fill out the questionnaires for US News. (This is specious: most campuses have “institutional research” departments who must complete federal reports all the time–and much of the data upon which these rankings rest is publicly available from the US Department of Education).
3. Protest against the rankings, lied primarily by the Education Conservancy, are also likely explanations, though Robert Morse was reluctant to talk about these possible factors. The fact is that many liberal arts institutions feel that the ratings are skewed against them. And many presidents of small, liberal arts colleges have pledged not to cooperate with US News in their annual rankings.

The aspect of the US News survey that was most often not completed was the “reputational” survey, in which college presidents are asked to rate the reputations of their peer institutions. This sort of ranking is highly subjective, and many college presidents know it. So many did not fill it out.
The fact is that the US News & World Report rankings are very influential in very many ways. They make a difference in how colleges report data. They make a difference in how colleges market themselves. They make a difference in the minds of many college counselors: in a survey of college counselors, the best colleges in America are (wait for it) the Ivy League schools (shock!).
But the rankings should not affect the decision on which college is best for a particular student. Choosing a college is a highly personal decision, and should be based on factors related to the educational success of that student. The rankings are a blunt instrument. They entertain. They sell magazines. But they don’t really help me much in recommending which colleges might be best for you.

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