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January 31, 2012
Gaming the College Rankings By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Any love-hate relationship must have its share of pain, so the academic
world, in its obsession with college rankings, is suitably dismayed by news
that an elite college, Claremont McKenna, fudged its numbers in an apparent
bid to climb the charts.

Dismayed, but not quite surprised. In fact, several colleges in recent
years have been caught gaming the system — in particular, the avidly
watched U.S. News & World Report rankings — by twisting the meanings of
rules, cherry-picking data or just lying.

In one recent example, Iona College in New Rochelle, north of New York
City, acknowledged last
fall<http://www.iona.edu/about/reportcommittee/docs/Audit-Report-Letter.pdf>that
its employees had lied for years not only about test scores, but also
about graduation rates, freshman retention, student-faculty ratio,
acceptance rates and alumni giving.

Other institutions have found ways to manipulate the data without outright
dishonesty.

In 2008, Baylor University offered financial
rewards<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/education/15baylor.html?scp=1&sq=baylor%20and%20rimer%20and%202008&st=cse>to
admitted students to retake the SAT in hopes of increasing its average
score. Admissions directors say that some colleges delay admission of
low-scoring students until January, excluding them from averages for the
class admitted in September, while other colleges seek more applications to
report a lower percentage of students accepted.

Claremont McKenna, according to Robert Morse, the director of data research
at U.S. News, is “the highest-ranking school to have to go through this
publicly and have to admit to misreporting.”

This year, U.S. News rated it as the nation’s ninth-best liberal arts
college.

There is no reason to think the U.S. News rankings are rife with
misinformation, and the publication makes efforts to police the data,
adjust its metrics and close loopholes.

But repeated revelations of manipulation show the importance of the
rankings in the minds of prospective students, their guidance counselors,
parents, the alumni considering donations, the professors weighing job
offers — and, of course, the colleges themselves.

“The reliance on this is out of hand,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, the associate
vice president who oversees admissions at DePaul University in
Chicago. “It’s a nebulous thing, comparing the value of a college education
at one institution to another, so parents and students and counselors focus
on things that give them the illusion of precision.”

The mixed feelings in the academic world were summed up in a report last
year<http://www.nacacnet.org/AboutNACAC/Governance/Comm/Documents/USNewRankingsReport.pdf>by
the National Association for College Admission Counseling: Most
college
admissions officers and high school counselors have a low opinion of the
U.S. News rankings, yet they use the published material, whether to gather
information about other schools or to market their own.

Claremont McKenna, part of the Claremont Colleges cluster outside Los
Angeles, acknowledged
Monday<http://cmcforum.com/news/01302012-cmc-office-of-admission-falsely-reported-sat-scores>that
a senior officer had resigned after admitting that he had inflated the
average SAT scores given to U.S. News since 2005.

People briefed on the matter identified the officer as Richard C. Vos, vice
president and dean of admissions, who once said, “We don’t play yield
games,” referring to the practice of encouraging unqualified applicants who
can be rejected to make a college seem more competitive.

Mr. Vos, whose name was removed from the school’s online roster of
administrators over the weekend, declined to comment Monday night and he
did not return calls Tuesday.

SAT score averages are also reported to credit rating firms and the
Department of Education, which is looking into Claremont McKenna’s actions,
said Justin Hamilton, the agency’s press secretary. He said the department
could impose fines and other penalties for supplying misinformation, but
rarely did, particularly if the college brought the problem to light on its
own.

Mr. Morse, of U.S. News, said that he and a team of four to six people
verified much of the information that colleges supplied, comparing it with
databases from other sources, and that they performed a service in making
the data public. But he conceded that his publication was probably at least
part of the reason schools have lied.

Iona’s case was extreme; U.S. News ranked its undergraduate college 30th
among “regional universities” in the Northeast, but estimated that with
correct data it would have dropped to 50th.

Also last year, the law schools of Villanova
University<http://abovethelaw.com/2011/02/villanova-law-school-knowingly-reported-inaccurate-information-to-the-aba/>and
the University
of Illinois <http://www.uillinois.edu/our/news/2011/Sept28.Law.cfm>acknowledged
that they had misreported some statistics; Villanova conceded
that its deception was intentional, while Illinois did not say. And at the
United States Naval Academy, famous for its honor code, a professor
recently accused administrators of inflating the number of applicants,
which the academy has denied. In 2009, a number of institutions were found
to be inflating their percentages of full-time professors — another
criterion used in ranking systems. The impact and extent of Claremont
McKenna’s cheating remains unclear. In a statement to the college staff and
students, the president, Pamela B. Gann, wrote, “Although the degree of
inaccuracies varied over time, we understand that the reported critical
reading and/or math SAT scores were generally inflated by an average of
10-20 points each.”

Mr. Morse said that without more precise information, he could not measure
how such a change might have altered the college’s ranking, but it might
have made the difference in cracking the top 10 of liberal arts colleges, a
bragging right that Claremont McKenna reached this year for only the third
time.

In the U.S. News rating
system<http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2011/09/12/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings-2012>,
explained in detail on its Web site, SAT scores account for 7.5 percent of
the ranking. More heavily weighted criteria include academic reputation,
student retention, faculty resources and the school’s finances.

Claremont McKenna’s reputation has risen over the years; as recently as
1990, it was not in the U.S. News top 20. But it is often conscious of the
comparison with its neighbor, Pomona College, which U.S. News rated fourth
among liberal arts colleges.

Bruce J. Poch, dean of admissions at Pomona until 2010, said of the
rankings, “They’re not benign instruments,” but conceded that they are easy
for a college to fall back on as evidence of its status. “The pressure is
real,” he said. “God forbid you go down in those numbers.”

Mr. Vos had been dean of admissions at Claremont McKenna since 1987. “He
was always one of the people that I considered one of the good guys in the
profession,” said Ralph Figueroa, director of college guidance at
Albuquerque Academy, a private day school in New Mexico.

In her Monday statement, Ms. Gann, the college president, said Claremont
McKenna discovered the discrepancy in reported SAT scores and conducted an
internal review, during which one senior administrator stepped forward to
take sole responsibility.

On the campus Tuesday, students said they were unhappy with the news, but
not greatly concerned, and proud of the college for making it public.

“I don’t worry about the rankings or how this will affect them, because
they tend to be pretty arbitrary,” said Blake Bennett, a senior who has
volunteered in the admissions office. “They change from year to year in
order to keep selling books. Working in admissions, we pay attention to
them, although we wish we didn’t have to. It’s just sort of a sad state of
American colleges and higher education.”

Ian Lovett contributed reporting.

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