<p>The best known schools work to limit and control information available to parents. The less that is known about the correlates of admission and after school performance, the more important prior reputation is and the harder it becomes for newcomers to visibly displace them. Hence, it becomes harder for Unknown Institute to say “Hey look: We have higher value added than Old School!” in a way that’s credible and easily verifiable.</p>
<p>Can rankings be abused? Of course. But this is true of any goods. If you look at fuel efficiency or cubic capacity of cars, customers can make a fetish of them and overlook good cars that don’t do well on those metrics. [Indeed, the megapixel race in cameras is a lot like this. Many foolishly believe that a 14 megapixel cam is usually “better” than a 7MP cam.] But if we had the data, it would be up to individuals and scholars to decide what margins were important to them. Nonetheless, many schools make the claims that the non-objective factors they look at “do” match up with life outcomes while withholding data that would allow researchers to evaluate their claims. Of course, it is possible for leadership skills or athletic ability to make up for test scores or poor grades but what if they don’t? If a school deems the ability to milk yurts as a valuable “skill” and then we find that all 100 students admitted to top school Theta were the only students admitted who couldn’t hack law school afterwards, that would be an important datum.</p>
<p>As a researcher, I have often tried to get more detailed student info – to be used carefully – to check relations between observed variables at time of admission and final outcomes, but to no avail. I have often been struck by how secretive private schools are. If not for the common data sets, I doubt they would even provide that much info. [For example, schools will not even reveal what the full range of SAT scores were for accepted students – just the 25th-75th percentile numbers.]</p>
<p>So absent governmental mandates, I suspect transparency will only be a pipe dream.</p>