Do colleges lie in order to attract students? That's what a Wall Street Journal story says although it puts the case more politely: "Colleges Inflate SAT and Graduation Rates in Popular Guidebooks: Schools Say They Must Fib to US. News and Others to Compete Effectively" (April 5, 1995).
According to the Journal story, some colleges are giving inaccurate data to the college guides that many students and parents use in deciding where to apply. For example, reporter Steve Stecklow found that Northeastern University in Boston does not count the SAT scores of international and remedial students even though they make up approximately 20 percent of first-year students. This adds about 50 points to the average SAT score for the freshman class and makes the school look more selective than it really is. New York University simply leaves out the SAT scores for "economically disadvantaged students in a special state-sponsored program." And for a number of years, New College of the University of Florida lopped off the bottom 6 percent of SAT scores. The result: some very impressive SAT scores, like the 1296 average reported for the freshman class in 1994.
Improving on the data does not stop with SAT scores. The Wall Street Journal also found that colleges lie about other common indicators of quality like the percentage of applicants they admit, the percentage of freshmen in the top 10 percent of their high school class and the percentage of students who stay on to graduate.
Why would colleges do this? It's simple. They are in a competition for students. To be successful, College A has to convince a lot of kids that it is a more desirable place to go than College B. The lists of "best" colleges offered by college guides, like the one that appears in US. News and World Report, have a great deal of influence with prospective applicants and their parents. If you're a little-known college, just getting into one of these guides could substantially boost your number of students applying for admission.
But well-known colleges also worry about where college guides will rank them from year to year. As a former dean of admissions from Colgate University explains, "When the American public .... says you're not in the top 20 and they're going to make their decision based on that, it puts incredible pressure on you to have the right-looking numbers." The Journal found that even Harvard University reported a different -- and slightly higher -- range of SAT scores to the US. News and World Report college guide than showed up on a Moody's credit report for the university.
People commenting on this story tend to call it a reflection of the terrible state of ethics in higher education -- and our society generally. But there's another angle.
Voucher supporters insist that competition is the best way to improve the quality of public education in the K-12 years. They say that if parents are given public money and allowed to decide among competing schools, both private and public, schools will be forced to raise student achievement in order to survive. The Wall Street Journal article tells another story. These colleges did not compete by offering students a better education. They perceived the issue to be one of marketing rather than academic excellence, and they competed by trying to make themselves look better than they were. Does anybody really think that competing K-12 schools would do things differently?
K-12 schools would be under the same kind of pressure to attract students that colleges are. If anything, it would be more severe because few have the endowments or alumni backing that many colleges have. There would be glossy brochures hyping school facilities and showing pictures of smiling students. And there would undoubtedly be school guides to help students and parents compare schools. The guides would be open to the same kind of abuse as college guides so we could expect to see exaggerated claims about student SAT scores and the top-level colleges and graduate schools to which kids were admitted. What about a monitoring agency to protect the public from false advertising? That would be a natural function for the U.S. Department of Education, but the very people who are talking up vouchers are also saying the education department should be eliminated.
Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by the Wall Street Journal article. Though market competition can lead to better products, often it just produces better ads. But the story should make us skeptical about claims by voucher supporters that competition is the answer to our problems with student achievement. Running a good marketing campaign may be a challenge, but it's a lot easier than running a good school.