"Gaming the System"; Claremont Independent Warns of CMC's Approach to U.S. News & World Report Rankings in '09

From The Claremont Independent's November 2009 issue. The Claremont Independent has always warned about the dangers of following the U.S. News & World Report rankings that were Gann's gospel. We were right; she was wrong--and now she's got to go.

Section: Campus News
Headline: Gaming the System
Subheadline: Why we need frank dialogue about CMC's approach to the U.S. News and World Report rankings
Author: Helen Highberger

Each year, the grinding wheel of U.S. News and World Report once again squeezes out a shiny sausage of college rankings.  This article aims to show that, as the old saying goes, you wouldn't like to see this sausage being made - but most people gobble it up without question. Prospective students, parents, college administrators, and to some extent the general public meets these rankings with the utmost seriousness, even frenzy. Websites like CollegeConfidential.com overflow with panicked high school students, measuring their worth through the Procrustean lens of SAT scores, and judging the colleges to which they apply no less numerically. Colleges put a great deal of maneuvering into the process, adjusting class sizes, admissions procedures, and allocation of financial resources in hopes of boosting their rank for the next year. Have you ever assumed something based on U.S. News's rankings? What are they even based on? Let's read the ingredients on this package of sausages and see what they're really made of.

I asked Dean of Faculty Gregory Hess what factors contribute most to maintaining Claremont McKenna's good ranking (up to 11 this year). The first thing he mentioned was our low faculty-to-student ratio, 8.5 students to 1 faculty member. He explained that this gives Claremont McKenna an average class size of 16.  In U.S. News terms, these numbers are part of a college's "faculty resource rank." Three other factors that help us in the rankings, he said, are CMC's graduation rate, its place in the Claremont consortium and the added resources from that connection, and CMC's selectivity rate.

This all sounds very reasonable, but there are many other factors that go into the sausage-making of U.S. News's rankings.  For example, the weightiest of U.S. News's six factors is a "peer assessment" sent to academic officials, asking them to rate the programs at other colleges. It is revealing that U.S. News values the opinions of academics at rival colleges over the opinions of, say, people who have actually attended the college, given that their rankings are intended for prospective students, not prospective academics.  

How about the faculty resource rank mentioned above? Not what it seems. The faculty-to-student ratio, a common and relevant benchmark, makes up only 5% of the faculty resource score. The largest single contributor to the faculty resource rank is faculty pay. Another interesting choice, since becoming a liberal arts faculty member at all is not a salary-maximizing move in the first place. I've always heard faculty members classify pay as a minus, rather than a plus, of their career of choice, suggesting that faculty do not choose their positions primarily by this factor.

While most schools would like to have other academics think well of them, and strive to compensate their faculty well, the student selectivity rank, as it affects college policy, has the potential to change a college's very motivation. 90% of this score is determined by entering students' SAT I or ACT scores and whether they graduated in the top 10% of their high school class. This is dangerous, especially for a specialized, elite school like CMC, tempting admissions officers to overlook leadership experience and other intangibles in favor of admitting students with good standardized test scores.

The problem, as I see it, is that U.S. News's rankings seem more calculated to the prestige of the college than the quality of education a student can receive there.  I have attended three colleges - Princeton, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont McKenna - and if I were to rank their quality of education in my chosen major, my ranks would be the opposite of U.S. News's. If I were hiring a graduate of one of these colleges, my assessment of the value of their degree would be so different than U.S. News's that I cannot help considering their rankings as positively worse than no rankings at all.  

The craven respect paid to the colleges ranked highly by U.S. News is worse than useless. Every level of education, from prospective college students to employers, is polluted by the gross misconceptions inherent in these rankings. To turn down a highly-ranked college for a lower-ranked one is regarded as some mixture of stupidity and insanity. Yet the real-world experience at the various colleges is enough to cause serious cognitive dissonance in a world so dominated by these rankings. Princeton students are no more interested in the life of the mind than Claremont McKenna students. Harvey Mudd students generally blow those of both other colleges out of the water in terms of intelligence and work ethic. Yet Princeton is ranked #1 in its class and Harvey Mudd is ranked #14 in its.  

What is the sensible thing to do in the face of such a nonsensical attempt at a value judgment?  U.S. News's rankings are not going away anytime soon, and they're not going to stop affecting how some people think about college. Still, we can choose not to give credence to these rankings.

The Claremont McKenna administration does not admit to being affected by U.S. News's rankings, and school officials including Registrar Elizabeth Morgan refused to speak to the CI about the issue. Yet the facts speak for themselves. Few students can help but notice the strangely artificial 19-person cap imposed on Fall semester class sizes, the term during which rankings are calculated. Unless the College has developed a fetish for prime numbers or a superstitious case of vigintiphobia, the only plausible explanation is that it is gaming the U.S. News rankings, which specifically take into account the percentage of class sections with 19 students or fewer. As a college, we must have open dialogue between students, faculty and administration about the effects of the rankings and how they shape academic policy and CMC's educational experience. We may not be able to shut down the sausage factory, but we can stop eating the sausage - at least it starts to include some real meat.

From a 2006 Issue of The Claremont Independent, Richard Vos Explains CMC Admissions

Section: News
Headline: Admissions Suspicions Confirmed
Subheadline: Left Over Right, Black Over White
Author: Elise Viebeck

Claremont McKenna College is often labeled "a conservative institution."  During the school's formative years, much of the student population and faculty identified themselves as right of center, and as a whole, CMC students have never been overwhelmingly liberal like the majority of their fellow college students.  Not, at least, until now.

 According to the CMC view book that is sent to prospective students, students are divided into an almost-perfect bell curve based on their political attitudes: 4 percent say far left, 3 percent far right, 29 percent liberal, 26 percent conservative, and 38 percent middle of the road.

Every year, CMC administers a national survey from the Higher Education Research Institute at the UCLA Graduate School of Education during freshman orientation.  The data goes back to 2001.  Even the class of the class of 2005 is disturbingly inconsistent with the data in the view book: 6.6 percent reported far left political leanings, 1.8 percent far right, 43.0 liberal, 17.1 percent conservative, and 31.6 percent middle of the road.

Not only is the data wrong, but it shows that CMC's student body is growing increasingly liberal.  For the class of 2009, 4.6 percent reported far left political leanings, 1.5 percent far right, 45.8 liberal, 12.7 percent conservative, and 35.4 percent middle of the road.

The real data makes the supposed bell curve significantly lopsided on the right.  Vice President of Student Affairs Jeff Huang concedes, "It is unusual on college campuses to have a right over left tilt as has been the case during certain portions of CMC history.  But that's not currently the caseÖit is now heavily left over right."

This trend is not new.  In the last five years, the share of conservatives peaked in the class of 2006 at 20.7 percent.  That number has declined ever since, hitting 12.7 percent for the class of 2009, though this shift has not prompted a change in admissions rhetoric.  According to Dean of Admissions Richard Vos, our political distribution sets us apart from other colleges in appealing to prospective students who value open-mindedness and rigorous discussion.  This aspect particularly reinforces CMC's purpose of creating successful leaders; in promoting the debate from various points of view, CMC better equips its students for futures in the realm of public affairs.

CMC has a unique and valuable niche in the market for higher education and must protect it.  Besides being a highly selective liberal arts college, our breadth and balance of political affiliation is rare and precious.  Such relative political equality, regardless of whether it is slightly left- or right- leaning, must be considered in view of other top schools in the nation.  Elite colleges like Haverford and Amherst lack a thriving conservative presence both on campus and within the faculty, a deficiency that, according to Huang, limits their students' growth, intellectual development, and understanding of diversity.

While CMC does not discriminate based on political leaning, it does discriminate on race.  Statistics provided by the admissions office show that it admitted roughly 45 percent of both black and Hispanic applicants, versus 22 percent of the white applicants and 17 percent of the Asian applicants.  The gap suggests an agenda on the part of CMC admissions, though, according to Vos, no such agenda exists.

The policies that govern admissions decisions are created by the CMC Board of Trustees and the CMC Admission and Financial Aid Committee, a standing committee of the faculty.  Current policy states that the student body should be diverse in many ways: racially, geographically, politically, and socio-economically.  Vos commented that CMC designed its "affirmative action admission policy" in view of the Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which allows colleges to use a holistic approach to the admissions process.  The college can consider race, but only as one of many deciding factors.  "The goal is more philosophical and less prescriptive," says Huang in reference to admissions' desire for a diverse student population.

Did a Claremont Independent 2006 Parody Predict The Future?

In October 28, 2006, The Claremont Independent published this parody of President Gann's obsession with the rankings. Did we predict the future? You decide.

Section: News
Headline: We're Number One!
Subheadline: CMC at the Top of the U.S. News Rankings
Author: [no author name found]

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of the Claremont Dependent

U.S. News & World Report has ranked Claremont McKenna College first in the nation among liberal arts colleges in its 2016 rankings.  This is CMC's first time in the top spot, and is the culmination of the great effort and vision of CMC President Pamela Gann.

"We're absolutely thrilled," said Gann.  "We put 15 years into this effort... it is so wonderful to see it finally pay off."  CMC's board of trustees lauded the president for her leadership.

"We want to give Pamela all the credit for this," said Ann Quinley, chairman of the Board of Trustees.  "It wasn't until the last Stark appointee resigned the board that we finally got behind her.  She believed in the 'New CMC' before anyone else."

U.S. News announced that CMC is the first school to receive a perfect 5.0 ranking in the "peer assessment" category.  College presidents, provosts, and deans of admission were impressed by CMC's 15-year turn from its dark conservative past.  Nearly everyone agrees that CMC is now a bright progressive star in the liberal arts community.

According to Pomona President David Oxtoby, "Pomona College will need to quickly follow CMC's lead if it wants to remain competitive in the market for top students.  There are still pockets of hate at Pomona, I'm embarrassed to say."  Oxtoby later confided his fear that some Pomona students will transfer to take advantage of CMC's tolerance major.

CMC Dean of Admissions Richard Vos marked the beginning of CMC's transformation as 2006, when he says he admitted a giant incoming class.  "That really prepared the students and faculty for our long-term plans," he said.  "Once we grew by 30 students a year, no one was bothered in 2010 when our first class of 500 entered CMC."

Of course, housing was a big problem from 2006 until 2012, when CMC completed Kerri Dunn Hall, the largest building on the 4Cs.  It stands on the old property of Pitzer College, purchased by CMC in 2009.  Although the building is a tasteful eight stories covering four acres of land, it was not always to be.  The first architect planned to erect a 40-story skyscraper on the property, but the city of Claremont rejected the design.

"Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if CMC, a former all male college, built a giant phallus to house our first-year students?" said ASCMC President Nancy Smith CMC '17.

Another housing change was the roommate policy.  According to the presidents of Amherst and Swarthmore, CMC now has the most progressive housing policy in the nation.  In order to keep students with a homosexual orientation from having to live in an environment of fear, CMC instituted mandatory mixed-gender rooms.  Now, a male can only room with another male if one of the two people primarily identifies as a female.

In addition to the new beautiful buildings, including the 5-year-old, 40,000 square foot underground facility called Pitzer Hall, Gann credits the rapid expansion of CMC's academic programs for the rise in its peer assessment score.  One of the first new departments added was the First Nations studies department.  "We didn't want our new ethnic studies departments to have sub-par faculty, as is the case at some of our peer institutions.  That's why we went right for the best.  Luckily, Professor Ward Churchill accepted our offer for the tenured position."

CMC is the first liberal arts school in the nation to offer more than 50 different majors.  "My critics used to say that we couldn't be the best at everything," Gann said.  "I invite them to take a look at our course offerings!"

The administration is most proud of the leadership department, which occupies two-thirds of Pitzer Hall.  By all accounts, the leadership department's "Semester in Pyongyang" program is the first of its kind.

The Marian Miner Cook Co-op is the largest all vegan co-op among liberal arts colleges.  "Once CMCers began to agree with each other on everything, there was less of a need for the forum that the Athenaeum offered," said Rainbow Wilson, advisor for the co-op.  "In fact, some would argue that it is better for conservative opinions not to be shared in an environment devoted to tolerance and education.  After all, hate has no home at CMC."

The report from U.S. News suggests it was the mascot change that put CMC over the top.  "Come on, stags?" said Vice President of Student Affairs Jeff Huang.  "I wonder if our founders even understood how offensive such an aggressive, stereotypically masculine mascot would be at a college trying to air out its dirty laundry."  The CMS Lambs celebrate their fifth anniversary this year.

It has not been an easy road for CMC, and there continue to be hurdles to its progress even today.  According to Dean Vos, the school accidentally admitted a self-identified "conservative" student in 2014, but by chance, he decided not to come here.  "That was really a close call," said Vos.  "I have made it my personal mission to see that it never happens again."

Unfortunately, the old government and economics faculty still do not have their promised new offices.  Instead of new offices, the board of trustees approved the purchase of the giant mud pit just east of Claremont Blvd.  With the generous donation of some elderly alumni, the government and economics professors were able to pitch a few tents in the bottom of the pit.  Gann, in a moment of charity, offered them some desks and chairs that were about to be thrown out.  She says that next year the school plans on setting up a wireless network in the pit.  "We're just thankful to be back in the city limits," says an unnamed government professor.

"You can't please everybody," said Gann.  "In order to impress college provosts, presidents, and deans of admission, there were difficult decisions I had to make.  We want to compete for the best students here at CMC, and the new rankings from U.S. News will make that dream possible."