US News and World Report releases its new college rankings this week, and it’s under attack for how the editors have changed their formula. Yet the changes seem to be a response to the way Americans are feeling about higher education.
For one thing, the new ranking is more focused on results rather than inputs: Schools now get more credit for high graduation and retention rates, for example.
At a time when more and more parents are wondering about the value added by college education, this seems like a no-brainer. Lacy Crawford, who has advised students on their college applications for 15 years, sees it as a response to “the idea that college has become an overexpensive, crazy boondoggle that no longer secures access to the middle class, let alone the upper-middle class.” The new measures put “more emphasis on how people end up.”
In this sense, US News is just catching up. The Forbes ranking, conducted with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, has for years focused more on outcomes (including starting salaries for graduates, and awards to them from outsiders) than inputs.
US News also decided to decrease the weight of admits’ high-school class rank in determining how selective a school is. Part of the reason: Fewer and fewer high schools even keep that data now.
Instead, US News added more weight to the average SAT scores of those the college admits. And that’s what outrages the critics. Robert Schaeffer, a spokesman for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told InsideHigherEd that it makes “no sense” to pay more attention to SAT scores.
In fact, groups like Schaeffer’s and the equally anti-SAT FairTest have helped push hundreds of colleges across the country to adopt “SAT optional” policies.
Yet US News has decided that SATs still matter, maybe even more than they used to.
For large universities in particular, it would simply be impossible to ignore SATs. They need some quick way to sort through tens of thousands of applicants from different high schools in order to narrow down the pool.
But there’s another reason that parents and students (the real audience for the US News rankings) don’t want to see the importance of SATs diminished.
David Kahn, the president of KahnTest, which does SAT tutoring for kids from the top prep schools in Manhattan, notes: “The greatest source of frustration on the part of students applying to college and their parents is the opaqueness of who gets in.”
Many of the most selective colleges say they could fill their freshman class with valedictorians and kids with high SAT scores. But instead they admit, as Kahn sums up, “the best of what they can find.”
That is, they coyly suggest that they’re simply making room for a virtuoso violinist from Montana or an Intel Award winner from Alaska or a point guard from Alabama, but the admission policy is defined so vaguely that you just can’t tell how much actual merit is involved.
Crawford, who has written a novel called “Early Decision” based on her experience coaching students and parents through the college process, agrees that parents are consistently frustrated about the “soft” ways that admissions decisions are made. She has a lot of clients who are “white kids with good grades” living in “suburbs off of I-95” who get shut out of their top choices.
“The fantasy,” she says, “is that college admission is a meritocracy.” And “to some extent, it is,” she says — but “at least 25 percent is luck and 15 percent is some ugly stuff.” (In “ugly,” she includes legacy admissions, but others might include race-based decisions.)
The SATs, says Kahn, “give families control and validation of academic standing.” Which is really why people look at US News at all. “Most people want to be given a number.”