Clemson and the College Rankings

Clemson

Clemson worked to "create more small classes of under 20 students and fewer large classes with 50 or more students, boost the SAT scores and high school class standing of incoming students, increase freshman retention and graduation rates, decrease the student-to-faculty ratio, improve faculty salaries, and more accurately report data." All of those sound like good things. Congratulations to Clemson for making an effort to do such good things.

And now the University of Florida !!!!!!!!

With another scandalous documentation that shows the irrelevance and unreliability of the Peer Assessment, we can only hope that Mr Morse changes the methodology radically as far as this glorified opinion survey is concerned.

US News integrity? Please...Let's not count on it.

gaming the test

the methodology designed to protect US News doesn't work. Merely throwing out low and high scores doesn't work if every student is taught to game the test-which happens at many top schools.

Clarifying a Corallary Thought

Two reasons not to be concernde that the Common Data Set (CDS)is sucking up valuable university resources.

First, the CDS is indeed quite a detailed report. However, it doesn't exist just to submit data for U.S. News. Rather, it was created so that the various college guides wouldn't submit so many separate surveys to colleges and universities. We need to be listed in those guides in order to come to the attention of prospective students, and the CDS makes that process more efficient, not less efficient.

Second, colleges and universities ought to be thinking about and monitoring the types of information being produced for IPEDS and CDS anyway in order to serve students well and effectively managing resources. The staff used to complete these surveys also provide data for internal performance monitoring and assessment purposes, so it simply isn't the case at most colleges and universities that an entire office exists simply to fill out the CDS. For small colleges this process is undoubtedly an administrative burden, and some institutons do struggle to manage the process with only part-time effort. But for all but the smallest institutions, the pressure to become proficient at collecting and presenting data about their operations is of significant value beyond simply being ranked or listed in college guides.

If we are going to rank - put some teeth in enforcement

At the best schools students live by an enforced honor code, why not enforce an honor code in the rankings. Imagine the impact of dropping Clemson or any other school to the bottom of the list for a year with an asterisk(* submitted inaccurate information).

It's about time this has come out

I am pleased that this is all coming to a head. I have maintained that any ranking system that has UC Santa Barbara, Irvine and Davis ranked over UT, UF, (flagship unis.)GWU, and Miami, as does USNWR, is a joke. These UC schools are gaming the system with their "artificially" high top 10 percent of high school class numbers. For expample, Davis reports 96 percent, whereas Stanford reports 91 percent, Vanderbilt 80...ridiculous.

A Corollary Thought

Out of curiosity I reviewed the USNWR's Common Data Set which describes the questionnaire used by higher ed. institutions for reporting their results for the annual survey. This document is 37 pages long and contains so many "data points" to be answered that my question is just how many employees within each institution must be assigned to actually compile all this data - talk about adding to administrative overhead! Beyond most all of the survey's questions, one must understand or be able to interpret the data points' terminology and then develop tracking methods to capture, either manually or by various computer programs, page after page of seemingly endless questions. Clemson, and likely most reporting institutions, have created specific offices responsible for management of this report. It would be interesting to know how many members are needed to staff that office as well as those other individuals required throughout the institution's academic or administrative units to gather, analyze and report such information.

What defines a quality educational institution can possibly be ascertained through a questionnaire - not sure; but it must be less involved than the current one, and above all be objective and based upon ethical - not manipulated but "factual" - reporting. In today's competition for reputational standing first and operational revenues second, objectivity and ethics seem to be traits outside the norm.

Finally, I suspect Clemson's approach to addressing the report in the "best light" possible is not uncommon if truth be told. Clemson's problem is that it promoted its "Top Twenty" goal internally in such a manner that the basic responsibility to the student may have been in some cases overcome by a misguided rationalization of its institutional officers. The yearly progress toward the Top Twenty was almost certainly a key performance measure for the president and certain executive officers - to what degree did this influence poor management practice, and were salary increases based upon such practices. These issues must be re-thought by the Board of Trustees given the unanticipated current national attention it has wrought.

What does the data really represent?

The rankings are simply a collection of data. Clemson made decisions to enable their data to be summarized in a favorable way according to the pre-determined methodology. This is because the rankings methodology is not based on science, but it is interpreted by many to be scientific. Thus, there is no ethics violation by Clemson. Rather, it raises the question of how is it that US News can profess that it can rank universities?

Clemson and how you manipulate the system

Some of the fraud perpetuated by Clemson in order to become top 20 in a magazine is based upon the creative inquiry courses used to create the facade that the number of classes with an enrollment below 20 students has risen at Clemson. Creative inquiry courses are primarily lab or field based courses--student research a prime factor in the creation of these courses. But wait US News and World does not count lab courses in its determination of ranking. Thus a few years ago the 3 credit Creative Inquiry courses were changed from lab credits to lecture credits.

All done by Provost Helms to provide a fraudulent method of increasing the number of lecture courses with an enrollment less than 20 students per course.

Look at the data and note that this change in designation helped in the rankings floating downward toward top 20.

The public also needs to look at senior and junior level major course enrollments. Clemson has allowed many junior and senior level courses to approach enrollments of close to 100 per lecture section.

This is not quality. Seniors should have an experience in these courses that allows discussion and one on one type of interaction. This cannot occur when you are teaching difficult subject material to classes that approach 100 students or more per lecture section.

Also note that labs have degraded in many cases. Lab courses or sections do not fit into the rankings of US News and World. Pack students in with TAs that are not qualified to teach the subject material or cannot speak English and what do you have--not quality.

Reputation matters

It's funny how when it comes to high-school teachers, raising salaries and smaller classes are the mantras of choice. But doing this systematically at a university is somehow unethical, sheesh. In college, like it or not, reputation is everything. A great football team and great rankings in US News means your school will attract lots of applicants. While it is true that there are regional schools with great programs, this is luck, coincidence, and ephemeral. Once the program gets going, the good faculty leave for better schools, and that regional program is crappy once more. Instead of whining, we need to either show empirically that somehow having smaller classes with brighter students and faculty alike is not linked to positive outcomes, or accept the fact that some schools are simply better than others.