Privileging the Privileged: How Rankings Distort College Admissions

In a recent speech at a conference on improving college completion rates, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called college rankings a “joke.” The prevailing ranking systems, he said, “do little more than Xerox privilege,” using a phrase employed by the President of Morgan State University to describe the function of most selective universities.

Secretary Cardona is correct. Indeed, if anything, he understates the extent of the problem. Most popular “best-college” rankings, such as those published by U.S. News & World Report, not only “Xerox” privilege; they enhance privilege. They do so by rewarding colleges for admitting even more wealthy applicants than they might otherwise do.

Of course, none of the rankings give explicit credit to colleges for enrolling rich students. Data on family incomes are closely guarded secrets and never appear in rankings formulas. But those formulas give implicit credit, by using various metrics that correlate positively with the socioeconomic status of matriculants. They do this primarily in four ways.

1. Student selectivity: The most obvious way is by evaluating institutions according to their “student selectivity,” as customarily measured by the average standardized test scores of their entering students, as well as their admissions acceptance and yield rates.

Evaluating colleges by the average SAT or ACT scores of their entering students provides a powerful incentive to favor admission of economically privileged applicants, since scores correlate strongly with family income. Even in the “test-optional” era, colleges need to enroll a high percentage of students who choose to report their SAT scores in order to boost the schools’ position in the rankings.

Additionally, giving schools ranking points for having a low acceptance rate or high yield rate has encouraged the spread of other practices that favor students from upper-income families — like binding early decision and merit-aid tuition discounts.

Binding early decision programs now fill a large percentage — often as many as half — of the seats in the first-year classes of selective colleges. These programs clearly favor applicants from prosperous families who don’t need to haggle over financial aid awards from multiple schools. Indeed, elite colleges are so eager to admit such applicants that they often apply lower academic standards to them.

Likewise, most selective colleges are now heavily discounting their sticker prices based on “enrollment management” algorithms designed to increase the odds that their admission offers will be accepted. Since financial-aid budgets are limited, it is not an exaggeration to call merit aid a “reverse Robin Hood” program that bestows aid on those who don’t need financial assistance at the expense of those who do.

2. Outcome measures. Rankings privilege the admission of wealthy applicants by using measures — such as graduation rate or post-graduate earnings — that encourage schools to admit applicants already programmed for successful achievement. U.S. News gives an 18% weight to a school’s six-year graduation rate. Although the publication does not use post-graduate earnings in its formula, many other rankings do. Forbes, for example, gives a 50% weight to various measures of post-graduate earnings and career success.

3. Institutional wealth. Best-college rankings also encourage admission of wealthier applicants by their tendency to equate a school’s financial wealth with its academic quality. U.S. News gives a 10% weight in its formula to the school’s level of expenditure per student on items such as instruction, research, and student services. But that’s not all. It gives another 20% weight to a “faculty resource” measure that includes spending-dependent variables like average faculty salaries, proportion of small classes, and student/faculty ratio.

Rewarding institutions for having high levels of such expenditures intensifies the spending arms race that already afflicts higher education. To feed the insatiable revenue demands of this arms race, rankings-obsessed institutions are implicitly encouraged to admit students whose parents can not only pay the full sticker price but also can make charitable contributions to the school. And it discourages schools from admitting needy students whose financial-aid grants receive no credit in the ranking formulas while diverting scarce budgetary resources from categories of expenditure that do receive such credit.

4. Peer assessment. In its rankings formula, U.S. News gives a whopping 20% weight to the results of a “peer assessment” survey administered to college presidents and deans. The survey asks respondents to rate other schools in their institutional category — for example, national research universities or national liberal arts colleges — on their overall “academic quality.” Superficially, it might appear that this criterion has nothing to do with the wealth of rated schools’ students. But it turns out that it does. As numerous scholars have shown, respondents rate other schools by their perceived prestige, as largely measured by their past rankings. And those previous rankings gave even greater weight than current formulas to the student selectivity and spending measures discussed above.

In all these ways, the dominant college rankings tend to exacerbate the tendency of selective colleges to privilege the already privileged in their admission programs — and disadvantage the already disadvantaged. In doing so, they undermine the historic role of American higher education as an engine of social mobility.

Fortunately, there are alternative — though lesser known — ranking systems that do reward schools for serving the less privileged, such as Third Way’s “Economic Mobility” ratings. Such ratings turn the prevailing prestige-based system on its head, with institutions such as the Cal State and CUNY campuses at the top and the Ivy League at the bottom. One can only hope that such rankings will gradually displace the wealth-based measures of prestige that not only Xerox privilege but amplify it.