The Great Debate

Quantifying the damage of the rush to quantify

David Callahan

Feb 2, 2012 11:50 EST

It was unsurprising to hear, as we did Tuesday, that Claremont McKenna College had lied about its students’ SAT scores to boost its position in the U.S. News & World Report annual ranking of colleges. University officials are famously obsessed with these rankings, and this is not the first time that a school has admitted fudging data. Just last year, Villanova Law School said that it had given false information to U.S. News.

Today we quantify and rank the performance of people and institutions as never before – all in pursuit, supposedly, of better outcomes and greater efficiency. Yet this obsession with metrics, a hallmark of the free-market ideology, invariably creates more incentives to cheat.

University presidents fret endlessly about the U.S. News rankings because they can have dramatic effects on everything from the quality of student applicants to the ability of schools to attract faculty and raise money. In an earlier era, one free of U.S. News, schools would not have had much reason to lie about SAT scores or admission rates. But now, with these numbers seen as hugely important, you can understand the temptation to monkey around with the reported data.

It’s not just colleges. Metrics have also taken over our K-12 schools, and they’re worse off for it. The education world has been roiled by major scandals recently in which administrators and teachers have been found to have manipulated student scores on standardized tests. These have not been isolated incidents, with revelations of false reporting in Atlanta, Chicago, Washington, Birmingham, New York City and Los Angeles.

It’s no secret why so many teachers and administrators are fudging test numbers: The pressure surrounding high-stakes testing is evident enough in the phrase itself. Tests now determine how schools are funded and, in some places, which teachers get bonuses. Incentives to cheat are baked into this system, and those incentives will only grow if more localities link teacher performance to compensation.

Similar temptations are elsewhere, with more disastrous consequences. The ever-greater focus on quarterly earnings by public companies has partially led to a rising tempo of corporate scandals since the 1990s. Executives, fearing shareholder backlash, have cooked the books to prop up stock values – most sensationally in the gigantic Enron and WorldCom frauds. (The Japanese manufacturing company Olympus is now embroiled in a major accounting scandal of its own.)

Executives didn’t used to obsess much about quarterly earnings, according to former CEOs I interviewed for a book I wrote about the Harvard Business School class of 1949. Now these numbers dominate corporate culture and pervert both business decisions and the ethics of executives.

Occupy Student Debt’s failure to launch

Chadwick Matlin

Dec 16, 2011 09:39 EST

A month ago, Occupy Wall Street made a demand. Or, as is the way in the nested hierarchy of OWS, a subcommittee of a committee of the movement made a demand.  They want all student debt in the country forgiven. All $1 trillion of it. And if the government would be so kind, they’d appreciate if it would pay for higher education from here on out, as well.

So this is what they—or at least some of they—want. But what has happened with this proposal, this great demand that we’ve all been waiting for?

Hardly anybody has cared.

In one month, only 2,694 people with debt have signed the Occupy Student Debt pledge, which states the following:

• We believe the federal government should cover the cost of tuition at public colleges and universities.
• We believe that any student loan should be interest-free.
• We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books.
• We believe that the current student debt load should be written off.

But a pledge is just a pledge. How are the banks and colleges going to be forced to take notice? “As members of the most indebted generations in history, we pledge to stop making student loan payments after one million of us have signed this pledge.” True believers don’t just march against the war, they burn their draft cards. Or in this case, their credit scores.

The American Dream is dead (or at least cryogenically frozen), but colleges profit by pretending otherwise. Tuition has grown significantly faster than inflation (an 8.3 percent cost spike in public universities last year), student enrollment is at an all-time high, and yet my alma mater’s fundraising team still calls me to try and solicit money. There is reality, and then there is the academy.