Bucknell
has become the fifth prominent institution in the past year to admit to
reporting inaccurate admissions statistics.
On Friday President John Bravman sent a letter to the campus community announcing
that between 2006 and 2012 Bucknell had reported mean SAT scores that were 7-25
points higher than the actual figures.
The
score discrepancy is due to the fact that in each of those years Bucknell
omitted the scores of between 13 and 47 (32 on average) students in calculating
the SAT mean. President Bravman stated
that the students whose scores were omitted from the calculation did not come
from any single cohort such as athletes, legacies, underrepresented populations,
or development cases, but most (not all) had lower scores than the
institutional average. They are
apparently examples of what used to be referred to as NIPS (Not In Profile
Students), defined as students admitted in spite of their credentials and
therefore outside the normal profile. I
remember attending a NACAC Conference session a number of years ago where Ann
Wright from the University of Rochester (later at Rice) did a tongue-in-cheek
presentation showing how easy it is for an institution to raise its SAT average
up to 80 points by omitting various cohorts of NIPS.
I
have written about this issue with regard to other institutions, and am frankly
tired of talking about it, but a couple of quick thoughts. As with previous cases, the falsification is
being blamed on a rogue senior admissions official acting alone, raising the
question about whether there is an epidemic of the moral equivalent of
Alzheimer’s spreading through our profession. I also find it interesting that all the
institutions involved in misrepresenting statistics (Claremont McKenna, Emory,
George Washington, Tulane, and now Bucknell) are places I think of as
first-rate, although not atop the rankings pecking order. All have impressive programs and impressive
student bodies and should be comfortable and secure in their images. Do those kinds of places face unique
pressures that lead to this behavior? And are there more out there?
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On
a related note, U.S. News and World Report has moved Tulane’s MBA program to
the Unranked category as a result of misreporting or GMAT scores. U.S. News had earlier moved GW’s
undergraduate program to Unranked. The optimist
in me would like to believe that this is the first move in carrying out my
suggestion that all institutions be Unranked by U.S. News. The realist in me says not to get my hopes up.
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What
do the U.S. News college rankings have in common with the flu? (If you’re looking for metaphorical wisdom
you’ll be disappointed.) Several weeks
ago in the car I tuned into NPR’s “All Things Considered” in the middle of a
news story. The first thing I heard was “it
changes its structure slightly each year,” and perhaps reflecting the fact that
I spend too much time thinking about college admissions issues, my first
thought was that it was a story about the U.S. News rankings. Turns out that what changes its structure
slightly each year is the flu—just like the rankings. If only there was a shot one could take to
be immune from the rankings bug.
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Are
high school students on television dramas unusually brilliant? Last week I watched the season finale of
Parenthood. Amid cliffhanger storylines
about Monica Potter’s cancer and whether Lauren Graham will move to Minnesota
with Ray Romano was a minor storyline about Lauren Graham’s son getting into
college. He logs on to his computer and
learns that he has been admitted to Cal-Berkeley. Later in the episode he learns that his
girlfriend is going to Tufts. Why is it
that characters on television almost always attend colleges high in the U.S.
News rankings, and how is the college admissions process portrayed? That isn’t
necessarily an ethical issue per se,
but I worry about the messages sent about college admission by the news media,
and I worry even more about the messages sent by the entertainment industry.