In chapter 3 of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, the author talks about WMD-backed college ranking and the enrollment eco-system created by such ranking. Back in the day, U.S. News was a second tier news publisher. In order to market itself better, U.S. News published a ranking of 1800 U.S. schools and colleges in the hope that such a ranking will garner publicity and sell well. Surprisingly, this model sold beyond expectations because the public quickly accepted this ranking system as the de facto standard for selecting universities. As a result, a feedback loop was created where owing to their low rank, the bottom tier schools kept going down in rank and the top tier schools kept going up in rank.
The universities realized the impact of this ranking system and started to adjust their activities to satisfy the requirements of the U.S. News WMD model. In other words, the universities started to find ways to game the system. Additionally, since the model used mostly proxy data as opposed to actual data about student learning, the universities found it feasible to manipulate these proxy data. However, since a large percentage of the model accounted for a school’s reputation, many young schools fell behind in the race. It felt as if the school’s were being judged by their credit history.
Now, that’s not say that the U.S. News ranking system was not effective at all. In fact, presenting a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to the universities helped them to focus on the attributes that mattered. But, these were attributes that mattered to U.S. News and not the ones that prioritized tuition and affordability. And as all the universities were aiming to improve the same attributes, they found themselves in an arms race. Such targeted improvements required a lot of funding. Eventually, the students were the ones who ended up paying for improving the school attributes. As a result, they graduated with a lot of debts that could potentially run for their lifetime.
To add icing to the cake, various consultancy firms sprouted to help students secure a spot in their desired schools. However, this additional service would cost the helpless students even more money. Now, mostly the privileged were able to access these services and could land a place at their dream schools. The working class kept falling behind and as a result social discrepancy increased. U.S. News would place the already reputed schools at the very top not only because these schools deserved the spot but also so that the U.S. News WMD model could seem credible. These top schools had a very high tuition and the ones at the bottom had to offer a substantial amount of financial aid to attract the top students. Numerous predictive analytics company started to help out schools to optimize enrollment so that the better fit students could eventually become an asset for the universities.
Obama administration took an attempt to revamp the ranking system by prioritizing financial attributes like tuition, affordability and post-graduation placement. Like any other ranking system, this one was also easy to game and take advantage of. Eventually, the education department decided to drop the WMD backed ranking system overall and replace these by user friendly interfaces based on pure data. Students could use these interfaces to explore school attributes that had a higher priority for them. As a result, the public could now access a more transparent and fair system for selecting schools based on data exploration.
