E19
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[00:00:00] Andrew Hibel: Welcome to the HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the Chief Operating Officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

[00:00:07] Kelly Cherwin: And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the Director of Editorial Strategy. So today we are joined by Colin Diver, who is formerly the president of Reed College, a trustee of Amherst College and the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he is currently the Charles A. Heimbold Junior Professor of Law and Economics Emeritus.

Colin, your most recent book “Breaking Ranks” was published by Johns Hopkins University. It is a probing assessment and critique of popular college rankings informed by your experiences at the institutions we mentioned above. So, Colin, I'm, I'm sure there's a lot that prompted you to write this book, but could you give us a little background on why you, why you wanted to write this book?

[00:00:43] Colin Diver: Thanks, Kelly. The short answer is I was actually asked by the higher education editor of the Hopkins Press to write the book based on a number of articles that I had written in, uh, various journals during the time I was president of Reed [00:01:00] College, and I was talking about the fact that Reed College had rather famously, refused to cooperate with US news and for that matter, other best college rankings.

And I was writing about why I thought the college not only survived but thrived. But the larger answer to your question is that I've always seen rankings as a kind of window into the phenomenon of higher education, and particularly frankly, about some of the dysfunctions of American higher education today.

[00:01:29] Kelly Cherwin: I have this press release from Johns Hopkins going into like as a former university administrator who refused to play the game.

I didn't wanna get too far into it unless you wanted to to speak on that. So I know that was the short answer. Do you wanna elaborate? Is there a longer answer on the meat of why you wanted to do the book besides Greg Briton asking you to?

[00:01:47] Colin Diver: Right. Well, I mentioned that I saw rankings as a window into higher education, and by that I mean that rankings, particularly, I'm talking about the best college rankings, the [00:02:00] comprehensive one size fits all product that is best illustrated by US News. They have come to dominate higher education in a kind of a scary way, really twisting and distorting what institutions of higher education do, and I think in the process, Sort of changing higher education away from what I see as its two primary missions.

The first is the mission of learning, of teaching knowledge and skills that will help someone not only to get an initial job, but really to live a fulfilling life and to have a fulfilling career for an entire lifetime. And second, higher education to me is primarily about social mobility. It's not about simply privileging the privileged and cementing status.

It's about helping people who are at the lower end of the status hierarchy move up. And I think both of those [00:03:00] things are in short supply these days in higher education. And part of the reason by no means the whole reason but part of the reason is because rankings have tended to exacerbate the commercialization of higher education, the emphasis on wealth and prestige.

[00:03:18] Andrew Hibel: I can't recommend the book enough, the “Breaking Ranks,” but I wanna specifically refer to the blog that you did called Privileging the Privilege, How Rankings Distort College Admissions, and specifically what you addressed was your, your number three. Which is institutional wealth and how it intensifies, and I quote here, ‘intensifies the spending arms race that already afflicts higher education.’

And the first word you used to describe the rankings is how it explains the phenomena of higher education. Seeing that cyclical process of now with the rankings and the whole series of blog posts in the book. Play to the rankings has [00:04:00] increased, if you will, the payoff to these institutions for these behaviors, and thus increased the institutional wealth.

But also now on the flip side with the Biden administration recently announcing the loan forgiveness. And the one universal takeaway the whole country has taken is the colleges cost too much. If there's something America can agree on is college is too expensive. How, in using that word phenomenon, how do you further describe how schools may have been spending on that spending arms race, as you call it, if there were no rankings?

[00:04:35] Colin Diver: Well, it's hard to imagine a world without college rankings because rankings are omnipresent in our society, and it's no surprise that colleges are ranked along with refrigerators and SUVs and so forth. But if the world didn't have rankings, at least the kind of rankings that are most popular and influential colleges, I think, would still compete [00:05:00] aggressively, but they would compete in a qualitative way and less in a quantitative way. They would talk about what a great experience you get when you go to a college. They would talk about how much you learn and what the hopefully lifelong payoff would be to, uh, attending that school. And I think that would make it clear that college is not something that can be reduced to a number. And it's not something that can be reduced to a simplifying formula. It's an immensely complex and consequential product, service, life experience, and it really doesn't serve the interest of parents and applicants to try to simplify it in that way. So I think that the colleges would of course, care about status and prestige.

I think they always did, the Ivy Leagues pedaled prestige a hundred years ago. But they would do it I think, at [00:06:00] least in a more qualitative and well-informed kind of way and, and not this kind of hyper simplified way that I think basically speaks to our worst instincts rather than our best instincts.

[00:06:15] Andrew Hibel: Thank you for sharing that. That is, it's a, a place that, while we know rankings are here to stay, but that's maybe a place where, and maybe we can talk a little later on about your experiences at Reed, but maybe that's a place we can all aspire to hopefully find academia out in maybe the next 25 years.

[00:06:32] Kelly Cherwin: So going off what you just said, you said that a lot of the institutions, and obviously these rankings are using just numbers. So in your first blog post, you talked about gaming the system. And I find it kind of alarming that they're little to no repercussions for institutions that are falsifying data.

[00:06:49] Colin Diver: Yeah, I mean, most of the data that goes into the best college rankings comes from the colleges themselves, and most of it is unaudited. There's no independent [00:07:00] verification system. It's true that financial data are audited. And to the extent that there are financial data embedded in some of the rankings, uh, those are audited, and then there's some rankings that rely in part on data that the federal government generates itself.

For example, some rankings look at post-graduate earnings using IRS earnings data. So that's reliable. But the great majority of the data, particularly used by US News are self-reported unaudited bits of data. And as I've said on a number of occasions, it's like asking restaurants to be rated solely on the basis of what the chefs say about the quality of their food.

Um, well, naturally they're gonna exaggerate and the colleges exaggerate. They really do. And sometimes that exaggeration takes the form of just outright making up the numbers, lying. There are a few cases every year that are [00:08:00] publicly reported where institutions have been caught red-handed, if you will, inflating their data. The most conspicuous example recently was the dean of the Temple University Law School, who was literally convicted of a federal fraud offense and sent to jail for lying to US News. Now you might say, well, that's a serious repercussion. And it is. But it's the only instance of anything like that having happened, and it would be very unusual for somebody to be sent to jail for lying to the rankers.

There are some cases where people have been fired by their superiors for supposedly lying to the rankers, but again, the, the penalties tend to be very, very few and far between. When US News catches somebody, uh, distorting data, the most that they do is drop them from their rankings for one year. That's what they did with Columbia University this year.

They dropped them in the middle [00:09:00] of the year. Uh, that is the 2022 rankings when it was discovered, thanks to a whistleblower report by one of Columbia's own faculty, that they had inflated five different measures that go into the rankings, but again, those kinds of things happen very rarely, and the penalty tends to be mild and by and large, um, people know that they're not going to get seriously into trouble if they inflate their data.

And the other thing is, on the other side, they have tremendous pressure at many schools to do everything in their power, including inflating the data in order to improve their rankings. You know, you look at the websites of many colleges, you look at their promotional literature, you look at their advertising, and so often it includes boasting about the way in which they've moved up in the rankings.

Well, if a college does that, then [00:10:00] the staff who work on preparing the data are getting a not so subtle message. Make the data look good, and that's unfortunately what happens.

[00:10:11] Kelly Cherwin: The interesting part, I think, until I read your book, I didn't know this was an issue and I feel like a lot of people are probably in the same boat as me, like thinking, oh, the US news and World I report and all these rankings, we should trust them.

So I appreciate the fact that you are bringing this to light. So I'll let Andy follow up on that question. Kind of more of like from the parent perspective.

[00:10:29] Andrew Hibel: To remind you, Colin, Kelly and I and Mike all have high school students and are currently entering into that discussion with them about colleges and, and our spouses trying to figure that out and I, I have a college junior and I thought your discussion of the purpose of college, which is learning and knowledge and skills to somebody's start of their career path, but then also trying to figure out how to live a fulfilling life. I often said to my college junior, you know, you realize this year she [00:11:00] rented an apartment, lived by herself on campus.

That this is the training wheels to adulthood. It's a safe place to learn what you need to be as an adult. It's so important. So as these parents of high schoolers, we know that balancing the emotional and practical needs for our children in the college application process is one of the most important things we can do as parents.

What type of advice do you give parents and the students when creating their list of schools to apply to and how to best use the rankings to inform the basis of their expectations of these schools?

[00:11:35] Colin Diver: Well, thank you. And, and let me say, I've been there myself with my two sons and I'm now indirectly there with my four grandchildren.

Uh, and your question is very good because it says that college is about a balance between the practical and the emotional, or between the analytical and the developmental, however you wanna put it. And the first thing I would say to parents is, [00:12:00] yes, um, the developmental and emotional part of college is critical.

It's very important, and please do not under any circumstances, think that rankings will help make a decision about the developmental and emotional side of college choice. And by that I mean, don't choose a college just because it's ranked highly and think that that's going to make you happy because it isn’t, it just isn't. In fact, the rankings are set up to create enormous disappointment because if you're not one of the handful of people, relative, handful of people who can get into a top 25 or a top 10 school, you're gonna be disappointed. If you look at the rankings, you're gonna be saying, well, I got into a school that was ranked number 68, or I got into a school that was ranked number 147th

I'm a loser. Um, nobody is proud of being number 158th. [00:13:00] So the emotional side has to be taken care of by things like, campus tours. Yes. Very important. Both before and after you're admitted and talking to people who actually attend the school. Talking to people who attended the school in the past, taking the virtual tour on the website, doing all the things you can to get a feel for what it's gonna be like to live there. Now, on the practical side, yeah, that's an important aspect too. You wanna go to a school that's gonna be affordable, that's going to have students that are comparable in their interests and their ability to you. If you are really seriously interested in intellectual pursuits, you're gonna want a school that has intellectual students.

If you're really basically just interested in getting a good job and getting a fancy credential, then you're gonna want a school with a fancy credential, and that has very good post-graduate earnings for [00:14:00] its graduates. Maybe you just want a party school. Well then guess what? There are rankings of party schools.

But you gotta be honest about what you want as an individual and as a parent you've gotta say to your children, college is one of the, maybe the most, important consequential decision you're gonna make for the first 30 years of your life, or 20 years of your life. So engage in a process of self-examination, self-discovery.

Ask yourself, who am I? What am I, What am I really good at? What am I not really good at? What do I love? What do I wish I could do better? And then the analytical part is, don't look at the numbers in the rankings, but sure, look at the rankings, all of them, not just US News, because they do differ and look at the methodology statements.

And look at what they actually use as metrics. Look at the weightings they give to [00:15:00] those metrics and ask yourself, well, that's what some journalist thinks makes a good school. But is that what I think makes a good school? Because it's my decision. I have to live with this. The editors at US News are not going to these schools.

I'm the one who's going to these schools and I've gotta make a right decision for myself. And then finally, use the qualitative data. Fortunately, US News and a lot of the rankings do publish descriptive data and you can get a lot of useful information, but for that matter, you can get it from college guidebooks like Fisk and Peterson's and others.

So look at those, and that's the way to deal, I think with the analytical side of the college choice.

[00:15:45] Kelly Cherwin: I feel like your advice might be similar when I asked this question, I know we talked about the students, um, and the admissions process and talking to parents, but in terms of the job seekers in our audience.

Do you have any other different advice? Obviously discovering if it's a good fit for [00:16:00] you, you know, not just do I wanna work at the institution because they're ranked four. A number 48th institution could be very fulfilling. So, is there any different advice you would give a job seeker when they're looking at several different institutions, and especially today with being able to, you know, live in Chicago and potentially work at a school in Texas?

Like, how do you feel if it's gonna be a good fit, not according to the rankings?

[00:16:23] Colin Diver: Well, my best way to answer this question is to tell you how I got to Reed College after I had finished my deanship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, search firms and head hunters contacted me all the time about various college presidencies and provostships, and the one that attracted me was the one at Reed, and it was largely because Reed was an institution whose mission was very distinctive and aligned with mine. I really cared about the intellectual life. I really saw college as a preparation for an entire career [00:17:00] and a fulfilling life and fulfillment to me meant pursuing ideas. And so I was looking for, uh, a school that matched my sense of mission. And I loved the fact that Reed also had refused to cooperate with the rankings because to me that was a way that they said, we really are serious about our intellectual mission.

We're not gonna play these sort of artificial, anti-intellectual rankings games. So I guess I would say to anybody who's a job seeker, who at least has the good fortune to be able to choose between two or more institutions, look for an institution that has a mission that's clear, well defined, and that fits with your sense of your own personal mission, your own personal career ambition, and if you find an institution that looks to be obsessed with rankings, because it talks about rankings all the time on its [00:18:00] website and its advertising, and maybe it's been caught cheating on the rankings in the past, or it uses rankings as a criterion for its strategic planning, which is quite common.

Ask yourself. Do I think that a rankings obsessed institution is capable of being true to its mission, or is it essentially abandoning its own mission and deciding that it's going to follow US News's mission? So that's my advice to job seekers.

[00:18:31] Kelly Cherwin: That's fantastic. I think the biggest takeaway I have for that, for our job seekers to make sure you know your own personal mission and if, if you don't have your own personal mission, make sure that you, you get one.

Yes, yes. And make sure you research that institution's mission as well. So thank you for that. That was fantastic advice.

[00:18:47] Andrew Hibel: I think it also kind of really dovetails back to we touched briefly at the beginning about privilege. Really, it's a question of, I mean, I, I think privilege in, in today's world is such a [00:19:00] difficult topic to wrap your head around.

Not just, theoretically, it's almost impossible to understand how practically it can apply in your day-to-day life. And in your blogs, you discussed the idea of privileging the privilege. Can you explain a little bit more about those institutions ranked high in those college rankings? Or actually providing a disadvantage to the already disadvantaged.

And maybe after you've done that, kind of come back from that job seeker perspective that if looking at privilege is important to you, how maybe looking at how the institution looks at the rankings as a part of their mission towards finding a more equitable world out there.

[00:19:41] Colin Diver: Well, the most popular and influential rankings, and that's particularly US News and World Reports, Best College Rankings have historically equated academic quality with wealth and privilege.

They've basically said that excellence means wealth. Excellence means [00:20:00] status, privilege. How have they done that? Well, they've done that by, first of all, surveying college presidents and deans and asking them what are the best schools? And by and large, that audience knows so little about so many of their competitors.

That they fall back on a kind of instinctive sense of who's the best by, who's the most privileged, who's the richest, and frankly who's got the best rankings. Uh, secondly, they rely very heavily on spending not only direct, but also indirect measures of spending. So the richer you are, the better your rankings are gonna be.

It's no accident that the best US News, Best National University is Princeton, and it has been for something like 15 years. Princeton on a per capita basis is the richest institution in the country, and it's no accident that their best liberal arts college is Williams College, which is I think the richest [00:21:00] liberal arts college in the country.

Third, they have used metrics that advantage, both academically privileged, but also the economically privileged applicants. So they've relied very heavily in the past on standardized test scores like S A T and A C T scores, and in my former world of law schools, the L S A T score. Well, it turns out we know from research that the standardized test scores advantage the rich. They advantage children from parents who are well educated and who have a lot of money, who are privileged and thereby confer educational privileges K through 12, even pre-K through 12 on their children. Secondly, in this category, they nowadays give a lot of weight to graduation rates. Well, it turns out that the absolute graduation rate of a school is driven very largely by how privileged the students are who walk in the [00:22:00] door as freshmen, it's no accident again that a school like Princeton or Harvard or Stanford with 96 or 97% graduation rates also has a gigantic percentage of students from the top 1% and the top 10% of the population. And these are students who would graduate no matter where they went to school. Uh, you really can't give these schools credit for graduating their students.

Yeah. Uh, at high, at high numbers because they would've, they would've graduated anywhere. So all of these factors encourage these schools to admit more wealthy advantaged students than they probably otherwise would. And that means given the zero-sum nature of higher education, for every additional wealthy, well privileged, well advantaged student that they admit, that's one fewer place in the class where they're willing to take a chance on a promising student from a lower income background [00:23:00] or with other kinds of disadvantages.

And so that is the sense I think, in which the rankings have tended to disadvantage the already disadvantaged. The colleges know that if they take too many chances, on too many really promising let's say low income kids from, you know, mediocre high schools, that they're likely to suffer because their spending rate, their alumni giving rate, their graduation rate, their S A T scores are all gonna suffer as a result.

And how does that affect people who are looking at institutions to work at? Well, if you, again, really, really care about social justice and you're serious about it, and you wanna work for an institution that really cares about social justice, then pick a school to work at that does that by not kowtowing to the rankings, knocking themselves out of shape [00:24:00] to admit the rich so is to improve their rankings, but that takes chances on lower income students and maybe if you're an employee of such an institution, you'll have a chance to actually help those students to graduate. To overcome whatever obstacles and burdens they bring with them, because that frankly is way more satisfying than simply greasing the skids so that another well, uh, fed, well-educated and well-resourced kid can slide through the school, get an A minus average, and go on to Wall Street.

[00:24:34] Kelly Cherwin: Where do two year institutions and community colleges come into play? Are they in these rankings or this is a complete separate category?

[00:24:40] Colin Diver: No, they're not in rankings, and I admitted in the prologue to my book that the field of rankings really applies only to the tip of the iceberg that is the American higher education system.

There are something like 7,000 institutions of higher [00:25:00] education in America. About 3000 of them are two-year schools and about 4,000 or four-year schools. And of the 4,000 4 year schools, there's only about four or 500 that are really selective and that are the domain of rankings. And so, you know, almost apologetically I said in the prologue, I'm not speaking to the part of higher education that is doing all the heavy lifting in society, particularly the social mobility part of the heavy lifting that is reaching out and trying to educate people who come from educationally and often economically disadvantaged backgrounds, older students, students with families and kids and jobs.

Rankings, don't speak to them. And that's too bad, but it's, it's a fact.

[00:25:53] Kelly Cherwin: Thank you, Colin. That was great.

[00:25:55] Andrew Hibel: We've covered a lot today and once again, would really encourage folks to check out your book called [00:26:00] “Breaking Ranks” if they wanna learn more. If you have additional questions or have any thoughts about anything that Colin shared, please feel free to email us at podcast@HigherEdJobs.com or tweet us at HigherEdJobs.

But Colin, one of the blog posts that you covered was talking about what institutions are doing internally to play to the rankings. Can you share with our listeners what exactly they're doing to do that?

[00:26:24] Colin Diver: There are many examples, um, that I write about. And I talk about gaming the rankings as consisting not only of manipulating the data that colleges report to the rankers, but also even more commonly changing policies or practices.

I mentioned the example of what I did, and frankly, my fellow law schools did when US News started to rank law schools. We discovered that US News formula for ranking law schools gave a very heavy weight to the average L S A T scores of the students we [00:27:00] admitted. So guess what we all did? We gave more weight in the admission process to L S A T scores.

Well, why was that a problem? Because there were lots of really interesting, ambitious students that applied to our schools that we used to admit and take a chance on because they had a, a wonderful life story. They had overcome obstacles, let's say. Um, and we, we really wanted them in the mix of the student body, but because they had low L S A T scores, we started putting 'em on the wait list or even rejecting them. And that's an example at the college levels schools when, when the S A T started getting more weight, schools started giving more weight to the S A T and less weight to the more subjective qualitative factors.

Another example I gave had to do with the small class size metric. Now I happen to like the small class size metric as a kind of proxy for the quality of the educational program. But the problem with that is [00:28:00] the US News formula uses only the percentage of small classes at a school in the fall semester.

So guess what? A lot of rankings obsessed schools told their faculty they have to move their introductory lecture courses with large enrollments to the spring semester. And they had to move more of their advanced seminars to the fall semester. Why? Because that way they would show that a higher percentage of classes in the fall had enrollments of less than 20. Um, the problem with doing that is all those students who needed those introductory lecture classes to move on to satisfy requirements or to qualify for their majors, had to wait a semester or in some cases, three semesters. And that's another example of what I would call a counter intellectual, uh, anti-academic result.

And one other example I give out of many is the rankings used to give a lot of weight to having a low acceptance rate in your [00:29:00] admissions process and or a high yield rate on your admissions authors. Well, how do you lower your acceptance rate by having, uh, a huge number of your students admitted through binding early admission because they commit when they apply, they commit to accepting an offer if they get one. So you know that if you give them an offer, they will accept and that will improve. That is reduce your acceptance rate. Well, the problem with that is that binding, early admission favors the wealthy. That is those students who know they can afford the full tuition and that they don't need to wait to see what other financial aid awards they might get from competing schools.

So once again, they've changed their policies in a way that I think tends to hurt at least one aspect of the educational program namely the social justice part of the educational program.

[00:29:57] Andrew Hibel: Thank you, Colin. That's a really [00:30:00] informative answer as to, uh, how, how schools are doing that. We thank you for joining us today. It was wonderful to be able to spend time with you and learn more and hear more about the work you've done. Thank you to everyone who's listening. Once again, please if you have questions or thoughts or ideas, email us at podcast@HigherEdJobs.com or tweet us at HigherEdJobs. Thank you, Colin.

[00:30:23] Colin Diver: My pleasure.

Kelly Cherwin: Thanks, Colin.

[00:30:25] Andrew Hibel: Thank you for listening. We look forward to talking next time.