College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy (review)

Perhaps one of the most public manifestations of commercialization in higher education is the proliferation of ranking systems. In the United States, the for-profit magazine U.S. News & World Report conducts the most popular survey, but Americans are not alone in their obsession with determining the "best" schools. Canadians have been turning to another for-profit magazine, Maclean's, for comparative information about their universities. As with U.S. News, the Maclean's university ranking issue is a revenue-generating machine, akin to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Nonprofit surveys exist, such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, but they are also inspired by a culture of competition. The veiled message behind these ranking systems is that higher education is situated within a marketplace, one that is increasingly global.

Given that institutional rankings are inherently tied to a market ethos, Lloyd Thacker's edited book on the topic is perhaps too narrowly focused on the admissions decision rather than the broader reasons why universities (and a postsecondary education) are tied to the economy. Indeed, College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy is a missed opportunity to engage high school students, their parents, and college admissions personnel (the book's explicit target audience) in a frank discussion of the mythology of meritocracy in a capitalist world and the social ramifications of human capital theory run amok. The closest we get to this goal is the observation of contributor Ted O'Neill: "Paradoxically, we may have been enslaved by freedom and free markets, by the manipulation of our wants in the market place, and by the market place's reliance upon currency and standard of measurement" (p. 106).

Thacker, the founder of a new nonprofit organization called Education Conservancy (for more information, see Hoover, 2004), has organized the book like a symposium for the National Association for College Admission Counseling (an organization often mentioned by the chapter authors), complete with anecdotal tales of high school college fairs and lists of best practices that seem pulled directly from a PowerPoint presentation. While the book lacks sufficient data to appeal to academics, the desire to better serve college-going students and their parents seems sincere.

Chapter authors are directors of admission and presidents from a variety of (mostly) smaller liberal arts schools in the United States, and their short essays provide a glimpse into the uneasy psyches of those on the frontline of the rankings war. We are warned that "Faked Figures Make Fools of Us" (p. 68) and asked to contemplate the obvious in "Status vs. Substance: Is There a Choice?" (p. 138). At worst, the advice is patronizing ("The most basic advice I have for you is: CALM DOWN," p. 38) and at best the tone is one of shared responsibility for the education of future generations, as found in "Let Them Be Students" (p. 12).

The 20 essays included in the volume are interspersed with four chapters titled "Editor's Stories," in which Thacker draws from his years of experience as a high school college counselor turned consumer advocate. In the first, Thacker uses this perspective to illustrate how the ranking criteria are manipulated by admissions personnel. He describes how some colleges will do almost anything to increase the number of applications, therefore ensuring a higher selectivity rating since only a few of the applicants will be admitted or even qualified for acceptance. To further massage these numbers, colleges have turned to Early Decision (ED) programs, which "radically increase yield statistics for the overall applicant pool" (p. 57). If the ED programs do not work, waiting lists are employed to allow the school to admit only those students who are sure of their intentions to matriculate.

Two other ways that institutions manipulate their relative national rankings are related to high school GPAs and SAT scores. He states that the practice of giving more weight...