If you are one of the loyal jillions who follow my blog, you know that I’ve been warning anyone who will listen how college admissions is based on a business model now, no longer with education at its core. Want proof? Read this most extraordinary descriptionof Northeastern University’s “meteoric rise” on the USNWR rankings, climbing in 17 years from #162 to #49. This ranking creep was orchestrated with singular purpose by NEU’s previous president, Richard Freeland, who began his presidency during the university’s decline, inheriting wide-spread layoffs and declining enrollment. Being a resourceful kind of guy, Freeland saw that the quickest way to stop the downward spiral was to pull a UPenn and “game” the USNWR algorithm.
It’s been done before. The USNWR ranking is well known to be gameable.
As a reader, I couldn’t help but empathize with his situation and imagine what I would have done to improve Northeastern’s situation had I been in Freeland’s situation.
The guy had vision and cojones. But in his calculus to save the school, was he thinking about the future of the nation?
Nah. Despite his laser-focus on boosting NEU into the top 100 schools, he made no real effort to increase the quality of education there, choosing instead to back-engineer the algorithm and tweak certain parameters like increased number of applications and higher SAT score range. His dogged pursuit of acceptance by Robert Morse at USNWR is just as silly as celebrity nominees kissing up to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote them an Oscar or young women trying to out-maneuver each other to win that rose and the Bachelor’s hand in marriage.
What are we doing here? We have such a short time on Earth to get things right. Shouldn’t we be thinking about our behavior and its long term impact?
This isn’t entertainment. Education is sacred and a deeply serious enterprise.
This whole nation has up and moved to LaLa Land, believing in this illusion of prestige. Is Northeastern really a better university than Ohio State-Columbus (#50) or U. of Texas- Austin (#52)?
Is Princeton really better than Harvard this year who was better than Princeton last year?
Universities just don’t change that fast, so what’s up? No surprise, Morse changes the weighting on certain aspects of that USNWR algorithm every year or two to create “drama”, which is marketing-speak for “selling more product”.
The USNWR is not God. It is not neutral. It wants to separate you from your money by posing as a trusted source, something you need in order to make good decisions. But is it? Look at what they are assessing. Nearly 23% of the ranking is a subjective opinion of US colleges/universities by other university presidents, provosts and deans of admissions. I used to receive that mailing from Morse every year, being asked to review 900+ colleges for their overall quality, and I wouldn’t complete the forms because I didn’t feel qualified to judge. You’re gonna ask competitors about their perceptions of peer institutions and pass that off as objective? You can see right there that the USNWR and other ranking systems serve to support the status quo. Those top 10 schools will always make the top 10 because of the parameters they are judged by. Harvard is the richest and most famous university so it will always be at the top of the list.
The reality is that there is no best school. There is just the best school for you.
The only way we’ll stop living in illusion and regain control of our children’s future is to use that critical thinking we all talk about but few of us seem to use.
Consider this: when things don’t make sense, it’s because there is no sense to make. There’s artifice lurking somewhere.
It’s America, Land of the Spin, where guys like Freeland advance their schools with little regard for truth and integrity and get rewarded for it. Freeland is now the Commissioner of Higher Education for Massachusetts.
How about we start taking the democracy back by looking past illusion to find the truth. How about we start reminding ourselves that education is a process that happens wherever we are, that we resourceful humans bloom where we’re planted, that there is no ‘one size fits all’ in the education of the human species. Rankings built on spin are irrelevant. The match is what matters.