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**DECEMBER 5, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The End of College Rankings?
Maybe the law schools will start an overdue stampede.
The
**U.S. News** rankings have always been suspect, and in turn they have
corrupted America's universities. Now, several major law schools have
begun a boycott.
<[link removed]>
This could end with the collapse of the ranking system if undergraduate
schools follow. Let's hope so.
The rankings were launched in 1983, when
**U.S. News and World Report**, the weakest of the three major news
magazines, came up with the scheme to boost visibility and
profitability. Amazingly, universities cooperated. The timing was
perfect. The rankings became both an emblem and an engine of the
marketization of American higher education.
As innumerable critics have pointed out, the rankings use arbitrary
indicators of quality, including such inherently subjective and circular
criteria as reputation. But far worse than the rankings themselves is
the ways colleges and universities try to game them.
One key goal is to attract applicants with elevated board scores and
grade point averages, which in turn moves you up in next year's
rankings. A higher ranking then attracts more applicants and a lower
ratio of admissions to applications, which moves you further up in the
rankings, and then attracts still more applicants, and so on. Academic
careers rise and fall based on rankings.
Since the rankings became supreme, colleges have hired entire
departments devoted to gaming them. A related financial goal is to get
the highest possible number of full-paying students combined with the
highest academic records.
Here's one trick to attract poor-performing rich kids whose parents
can pay full freight: Since grades and board scores are counted in the
rankings for students admitted in the fall but not the spring, some
universities have devised the trick of creating programs abroad to stash
freshmen for the fall semester
<[link removed]>,
and then bring them onto the home campus in the spring semester, when
their mediocre high school records do not influence the rankings.
That way, colleges can admit more kids with lower scores whose parents
don't need financial aid. This is advertised as a kind of pre-college
enrichment-a gap semester. Maybe it works that way for some students;
however, its design was not mainly pedagogical but aimed at manipulating
the rankings.
Merit scholarships have a long history. But some colleges now use "merit
aid" as a token prestigious scholarship to attract students with high
scores whose parents don't really need the help and can pay most of
the full cost. This comes at the expense of deeper, need-based financial
aid. All these games help explain why poor-performing affluent students
are more likely to attend top-rated universities
<[link removed]>
than high-performing kids from poor families.
These patterns of social class and higher education are deeply
entrenched in the intergenerational inequality of American life. The
irony is that universities claim to be avenues of upward mobility. Most
of the things they might do to change those patterns are hard.
Boycotting the
**U.S. News** rankings should be relatively easy.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Building Steam in Lithium Valley
<[link removed]>
Imperial County, one of the most depressed areas in America, has a
clean-energy fortune stored deep in an underground reservoir. Can it be
extracted, and will downtrodden residents see the benefits? BY DAVID
DAYEN
Brothers From Another Planet
<[link removed]>
Kanye West, Herschel Walker seem pleased with the Pandora's box of
horrors they've opened. But when mental health comes into play, this
game becomes far more insidious. BY RAMENDA CYRUS
Big Tech's Old Friend Helms Key Biden Administration Role
<[link removed]>
Louisa Terrell, before becoming Biden's director of legislative
affairs, spent two years at Facebook at a key time. BY ANDREA BEATY &
JULIAN SCOFFIELD
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