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 Ameri🙈cans 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 hiꦐgh graduation and retention rates, for example.
At a ꦆtime 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 outsꦕiders) than inputs.
US News also decided to decrease the weight o🐈f 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 coll𝔍ege admits. And that’s what outrages the critics. Robert Schaeffer, a spokesman for the National Center𒀰 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 coun༒try 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 applica൲nts from different high schools in order to narrow down the pool.
But there’s another reason that parents and studenꩵts (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 fr๊ustration on the part of students applying to college and their parents is the opaqueness of who gets in.”
Many of the most sele𓃲ctive 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🌺” wayꦺs 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.ಌ” 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 de🅷cisions.)
The SATs, says Kahn, “give families control and validation of academic standing.” Which is really why people look at US News at all. “Most p🐓eople want to be given a number.”