Columbia plummets

After succumbing to Goodhart's Law

The US News and World Report just demoted Columbia from the second place in its ranking of research universities to the eighteenth. The publication used third-party data, not numbers Columbia provided, to assign this rank.

To understand why, let’s take a little detour to England in 1975.

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”

Not too catchy, right? Charles Goodhart, a British economist, was criticizing Margaret Thatcher’s monetary policy.

Here’s how Jerry Muller rephrased Goodhart’s Law in his excellent book, The Tyranny of Metrics.

“Anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed.”

Colleges try to game the US News and World Report rankings. They submit artificially flattering stats about themselves. Emory did it, Claremont McKenna did it, Temple did it, and this handful of schools did it.

Earlier this year, Michael Thaddeus, a math professor at Columbia, pointed out that his employer does it too. Here’s a summary, which is worth reading. He alleges that Columbia massaged statistics about class size, the shares of faculty with terminal degrees and who work full time, student-to-faculty ratio, spending on instruction, and graduation rates to rise up the US News rankings. The most eyebrow-raising claim he made is that the college counts the money it spends on caring for patients in its hospital as spending on instruction.

Columbia tried to withdraw itself from this year’s ratings by not submitting its stats to US News, claiming it needed time to do some internal investigating.

US News didn’t take no for an answer. It used third-party stats and some probably made-up numbers to calculate a new ranking for Columbia—and it wasn’t a flattering one.

What can we conclude from this mess?

Colleges care a lot about the US News rankings.

What does that mean for your kid’s admission chances?

An application with the traits that the US News rankings reward will be an appealing one, because it will help the college rise up the rankings and/or fight off the competitors nipping at its heels.

At very selective schools, those traits are required just to get in the “good pile.” At less selective—but still very good—schools, those traits could get you in the door, very possibly with some merit aid to sweeten the deal. Merit aid is just buying a kid’s test scores and grades, after all.

What are the traits that the US News rankings value? How can your kid dangle them at the colleges?

1.    Ability to pay full tuition, to avoid graduate indebtedness

2.    High test scores and grades

3.    Seeming likely to graduate if admitted

I can’t help you with the first thing on that list, unfortunately.

If you want to find the most effective and least-cost ways to achieve trait 2, you could sign up here for my online seminars on academics and standardized testing.

For trait 3, good grades and high test scores are pretty convincing evidence of graduation likelihood already. To drive the point home, you could sign up here for a one-on-one session to discuss ways to optimize essays and letters of recommendation.

I look forward to working with your family!