Inside Higher Ed: 'Manipulating,' Er, Influencing 'U.S. News'

Parent Cafe
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<p>[ul][li][Remarks</a> about Clemson shock crowd: School official says it walks ethical line in rankings; Clemson says it’s untrue](<a href=“http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20090604/NEWS/906040319]Remarks”>http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20090604/NEWS/906040319)[/li][li][Rankings</a> Rancor at Clemson <a href=“Includes%20%5Burl=http://insidehighered.com/content/download/304441/4003268/version/1/file/scan0001.pdf]Catherine%20E.%20Watt’s%20presentation[/url]%20and%20[url=http://insidehighered.com/content/download/304440/4003265/version/1/file/AIR+response.doc]Clemson’s%20official%20response[/url]”>/url</a>[/li][*][url=<a href=“http://www.thestate.com/154/story/813166.html?storylink=omni_popular]College”>http://www.thestate.com/154/story/813166.html?storylink=omni_popular]College</a> rankings: Did Clemson play fair in quest to be the best?](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/04/clemson]Rankings”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/04/clemson) [/ul]</p>

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<p>[More</a> Rankings Rigging](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/08/usc]More”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/08/usc):</p>

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<p>^ slimeballs</p>

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<p>See also this follow-up: </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/09/clemson[/url]”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/09/clemson&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>Thanks for the update.</p>

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<p>I am pleased all of this is “gaming” information is finally coming out and I hope reaching a critical mass to once and for all bury USNWR (its only money maker are these inane lists). In addition to what’s going on at Clemson, I have maintained that any ranking system that has UC Santa Barbara, Irvine and Davis in the top 50 ranked over UT, UF, Penn State (flagship unis.), Tulane, GWU, and Miami, as does USNWR, is a joke. </p>

<p>These UC schools are gaming the system with their artificially high “estimated” top 10 percent of high school class numbers. For example, Davis reports 96 percent, whereas Harvard reports 95 percent, Stanford reports 91 percent, Vanderbilt 80. This is juxtaposed with these UC schools’ low SAT/ACT achievement. Davis: average SAT1160/ACT24; Irvine: SAT1120/ACT24; SB: SAT1185/ACT25. By any reasonable standard these numbers are atrocious for purported top 50 schools. Ridiculous.</p>

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<p>Other than the highly dubious peer rating recommendations, which are imo one of the worst aspects of all of these ratings systems, I can’t fault Clemson on any of their other actions.</p>

<ol>
<li>Class Size: class size research at the high school level indicates that class sizes below 20 students (possibly below 17 or 18) are associated with better student learning. Class sizes above that level are relatively indifferent – you don’t see much if any change in performance from a class size of 25 vs. 40, for example. This is probably because the nature of teacher/student interaction changes once you can’t run the class as a seminar. So, Clemson engineering more classes to have 20 or fewer by requiring others to grow from 55-70 seems like a reasonable tradeoff. Our middle school keeps core english, math, science, and language courses at 20 kids and trades off with much higher elective class sizes.</li>
<li>Salary Reporting: If I read it correctly, Clemson changed their reporting to include salaries and benefits, which is what the instructions requested. Originally they had just reported salaries. Benefits can easily add 32-37%, so if that’s what US New requested, giving them the fully loaded numbers is reasonable. Other data users may ask for different numbers. We get asked for salary only, salary & benefits, salary & benefits & workman’s comp depending on who’s asking. We’re also asked to compute all sorts of averages, some based on the number of employees, some based on FTE, which can really cause the numbers to shift if you have a lot of part-time staff.<br></li>
<li>Choosing to be pickier about students. Their school, their choice. I don’t hear a lot of complaints about UCLA, UVA or UNC Chapel Hill being picky about what students they admit. Why should Clemson be held to a different standard? If they’re selecting students who are more likely to stay at Clemson for a second year, then they’re probably doing the right thing.</li>
<li>Working to improve the graduation rate. Hard to see how anyone could criticize this.</li>
<li>Encouraging alumni to give and increase giving. Tracking down lost alumni: Well, many public U’s came late to this party, but Clemson isn’t the first who’s aggressively trying to encourage alumni to donate. I get multiple solicitations a year from different schools at UCLA, and a number have mentioned how influential donations are in the ranking systems. If your alumni don’t/won’t give, what does that say about the school? </li>
</ol>

<p>Some ratings systems encourage good behavior. When Congress mandated that hospitals publicly report hospital-acquired infections, guess what suddenly got LOTS of attention in the hospital community? Guess what’s happened to infection rates – they’ve dropped. As someone with a parent who suffered one of these, I can only say – why didn’t they rate them sooner?</p>

<p>Ratings aren’t perfect. But the graduation rates published by the NCAA and the subsequent reduction in numbers of scholarships an institution can offer if they have a poor graduation rate has caused a number of universities to begin paying a lot more attention to the athlete part of the student-athlete equation. That’s a good thing.</p>

<p>As I look at the US News ratings, the key things I’d like to see changed are

  1. Elimination of the peer ratings entirely, with the substitution of data on citation counts. (If a professor at UCLA and one at U Chicago co-author a paper that turns out to be important and is cited by 2400 other papers, then that is a measure of research effectiveness. These citation counts are already tracked in many fields – you’d need to find some way to weight them across disciplines, but it gets away from the reputation issue and gets much more directly to the quality issue.);
  2. Financial Aid % of need met changed to be Financial Aid % of need above Federal EFC met, so that a school that simply declares that the family can provide $10 or 12K more than the EFC doesn’t end up looking a lot better from the FA perspective than one that doesn’t play with the EFC.</p>