President Obama's Town Hall on College Affordability: Binghamton, NY (2013)

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• published: 05 Sep 2013
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Counselors suggest one place to begin a search for colleges is to consult a ranking guide. Two well-known college and university rankings guides are the U.S. News and World Report and The Washington Monthly's "College Rankings" issue, but there are many different groups that produce college rankings of U.S. schools based on different factors and using different methodology. Advisors stress that consulting a ranking list is only a beginning, and that much more research is needed. Rankings have been the subject of much criticism. Since much of the data is provided by colleges themselves, there are opportunities for schools to manipulate the rankings to enhance prestige. There have been instances in which school officials deliberately misreported statistics, such as an admissions dean at Claremont McKenna who falsified average SAT statistics,[47] and a report that Emory University falsely reported student data for "more than a decade,"[48] as well as reports of false data from the United States Naval Academy and Baylor University.[49] Writer Andrew Ferguson noted considerable hypocrisy surrounding rankings: some colleges pretend to loathe the guidebooks that rank them, yet if they get a good write-up, they "wave it around like a bride's garter belt."[12] Lynn O'Shaughnessy criticized the "mindless pursuit of better numbers" by colleges to boost their college rankings as destructive and wrote that families place too much emphasis on the rankings as a way to select colleges.[50] Further, she criticized the US News rankings for failing to take a college's affordability into account[51] or factor in the average student indebtedness after college[49] as well as failing to measure how well colleges actually educated their students.[49] She noted how the US News algorithm "favors schools that spurn more students."[49] College admissions counselors criticized rankings as misleading, and criticized the rankings inputs of peer assessments, student selectivity and alumni giving as being poor predictors of a college's overall quality.[52] The rankings title "America's Best Colleges", prompted counselors to ask "best for whom"?[52] In 2007, members of the Annapolis Group discussed a letter to college presidents asking them not to participate in the US News "reputation survey".[53] A majority of the approximately 80 presidents at the meeting agreed not to participate,[54] although the statements were not binding.[55] Members pledged to develop alternative web-based information formats[55] in conjunction with several collegiate associations.[56] US News responded that their peer assessment survey helps them measure a college's "intangibles" such as the ability of a college's reputation to help a graduate win a first job or entrance into graduate school.[57] An article by Nicholas Thompson in Washington Monthly criticized the U.S. News rankings as "confirming the prejudices of the meritocracy" by tuning their statistical algorithms to entrench the reputations of a handful of schools, while failing to measure how much students learn.[58] Thompson described the algorithms as being "opaque enough that no one outside the magazine can figure out exactly how they work, yet clear enough to imply legitimacy."[58] One effort to systematize the compilation of college admissions data is the Common Data Set initiative.