NHEG-Magazine-March-April

www.NewHeightsEducation.org
www.NewHeightsEducation.org
Are College Rankings
Just a Sham?
A college’s success may be less about the
quality of its instruction and more about
the talent it can recruit.
By Jonathan Wai
Friday, August 23, 2019
Each year various magazines and newspapers publish college rankings in an attempt to inform parents and prospective students
which colleges are supposedly the best.
U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Colleges”—perhaps the most influential of these rankings—first appeared in 1983. Since
then, many other rankings have emerged, assessing colleges and universities on cost, the salaries of graduates, and other
factors.
The Methodology
For example, in releasing its new college rankings in August 2019, Forbes said it “eschews common metrics like acceptance
rate, endowment and freshmen SAT scores” and focuses instead on outputs like “student debt, alumni salary, graduation rate
and student satisfaction.”
In 2018 The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education released their new rankings, which judge colleges on things that
range from how much graduates earn to the campus environment to how much students engaged with instructors.
But what, if anything, do all these college rankings really reveal about the quality and value of a particular college?
In order to provide a new perspective on rankings, my colleagues Matt I. Brown, Christopher F. Chabris, and I decided to rank
colleges according to the SAT or ACT scores of the students they admit. All three of us are researchers with backgrounds in
education and psychology.
For our analysis, we simply ranked all 1,339 schools by a standardized test score metric.
Hierarchy of Smarts
We discovered that schools higher up on the rankings generally admit students with higher SAT or ACT scores. In other words,
what the rankings largely show is the caliber of the students that a given college admits—that is, if you accept the SAT as a
valid measure of a student’s caliber. Though there is often public controversy over the value of standardized tests, research
shows that these tests are quite robust measures to predict academic performance, career potential, creativity, and job
performance.
Critics of the SAT say it tests for students’ wealth, not caliber. While it is true that wealthier parents tend to have students with
higher test scores, it turns out the research robustly shows that test scores, even when you consider socioeconomic status, are
predictive of later outcomes.
Our ranking also disproves the notion that the No. 1 school in the land is slightly better than the No. 2 school—and so on down
the list. Rather it shows that the vast majority of schools admit students who earn a score between 900 and 1300 on the SAT—
that is, on the combined scores on the SAT Math and Verbal. Greater variations in test scores appear in schools that admit students
at the low and high end of the distribution—those students who earn below a 900 or above a 1300 on their SATs.
106 NHEG Magazine | January - February 2020
January - February 2020 | NHEG Magazine 107