For this week's installment of The Choice on India Ink, we have an essay about the malpractice of United States colleges and universities that misreport data to climb the college rankings charts. The author, Ben Murray, is an intern for The Choice and a student at New York University. - Tanya Abrams
Last week, Emory University came clean. After a three-month investigation, the private university near Atlanta - which was recently ranked 20th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report - released a statement admitting to fudging data about its students:
The investigation revealed that both the University's Office of Admission serving Emory College, and the University's Office of Institutional Research, annually reported admitted students' SAT/ACT scores to external surveys as enrolled student scores, since at least the year 2000. This had the effect of overstating Emory's reported test scores. The report found that class rankings were also overstated, although the methodology used to produce the data was not clear.
Although the confession is likely a shocking embarrassment to many who are associated with the university, it's hardly a rare circumstance. In fact, Emory is the latest in a string of American colleges and universities that have recently been forced to confess to obscuring or ignoring the rules when it comes to reporting data about their schools. While some universities have been open about the practice and others have not, most - if not all - of the misreporting has been done to better a university's position in variou s college ranking charts.
A similar situation happened recently at Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts school in Southern California. This year, the college admitted to submitting false SAT scores to various publications for the past six years. Claremont McKenna was recently rated the ninth best liberal arts college in the nation, and although its U.S. News ranking did not change after the scandal broke, Kiplinger magazine did decide to remove the college from its 2012 rankings.
Other universities that have recently been forced to confess to data fudging include Iona College in New York, Baylor University in Texas, and the law schools at Villanova University and the University of Illinois.
But what's shocking is not the number of American universities that have fabricated statistics, but rather the multitude of ways in which they have done so. It goes far beyond misreporting SAT and ACT scores. For instance, represen tatives at Baylor acknowledged in 2008 that the school had offered monetary rewards to admitted students to retake the SATs in the hopes of increasing the university's average score. Also, in 2009, a handful of universities were found to have been exaggerating their percentages of full-time professors, which is a common criterion in college ranking systems.
It would be easy to solely place the blame on the universities for their falsifications. But the true culprit is the extreme emphasis on rankings in the American college admissions process. Students, parents, high school advisers and university representatives alike each play a substantial role in this, and while it is unlikely that rankings will ever become irrelevant, these scandals should undoubtedly serve as cautionary lessons to all who are involved in the college admissions process.
Rankings can certainly be advantageous in many ways, whether it's determining which schools are best with financial aid or which schools have the best biology programs, among a plethora of other criteria. But to select one school over another simply because the former has a higher overall U.S. News ranking is to deny oneself the ability to find a school that is the best fit for each student. Only when we substantially diminish the stress on rankings will a vast majority of students be able to find that match, and at that time, the data fabrication will likely end.
