now you are starting to ask extremely uncomfortable questions for the higher education cabal.

Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at least help the universities combat what was an increasing pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or establish the value of a university's program. You cannot as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.

The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific process by universities who will simply claim even more profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of study, without any control of variables.

The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data that is available strongly indicates that universities are largely not actually conferring the value one may expect. In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the primary determination of the quality of the student on graduation, which seems to hold across the board.

Exactly! It's about reducing evidence and accountability, along with increasing enrollment ($).

University Presidents and Trustees have this bizarre fixation on rankings. I have no clue why, especially considering the fact that that composition of the top 100 is fairly stable. Rarely does a university experience a big swing, up or down. Most universities are never going to dethrone the top 20, no matter how hard they try. And it's not like they are in desperate need for enrollment either.

It’s not really bizarre at all. Parents and therefore students care about rankings, and it directly leads to enrollment, donations, and talent attraction. There might not be changes in overall rankings but individual college or program rankings do change substantially.

The administration will all profess a desire not to be so beholden but it’s part of the game so to speak, you have to play.

Source: current board member of a public university college

>"individual college or program rankings do change substantially."

I hadn't considered that. Good insight.

I expect it's a case of metrics-measured, metrics-optimized-for.

Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement administrators can take to financial supporters (either government or private) and say "Here's what we're spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become very important to administrators.

There was a stretch in my life where I knew a lot of people who knew where George Washington University ranked versus Carleton College versus who knows what. The upper middle classes take this stuff seriously.

When people hear about a university they don't know about, they often get their initial impressions from the rankings. I imagine universities that fail that test can end up being filtered out very early on in the process. For some people anything top 20 is great, but I think even the top universities don't want to be written off by the best candidates because they were #11 instead of #10.

Because we put MBA’s in leadership positions of universities so they do what they’ve been trained to do - run a business. And part of that is finding metrics to measure their success by.

Someone should give those guys an old-school CRPG to provide an outlet for this make-the-number-go-up fixation.

The metric that can be measured is not the eternal metric. The result that can be result-driven is not the eternal result.

What do you think fantasy football is?

High calibre students not only help the university's rankings, but also other students. A few of my courses had absolutely terrible lecturers, but we managed to more or less learn the material from each other.

I had a girlfriend at U C Davis, and I found the opposite.

The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the front row, with four color pens in hand. They never helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating. She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were. They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)

Yeah it really depends on the students' objectives/options. For Electrical/Computer Engineering majors at my University we all knew we were all going to at least get decent jobs at graduation, those going to Grad school were the minority. So it was a very collegial atmosphere for the most part.

But if you're in one of those programs where the Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.

Sometimes the _professors_ would get sick of the shit the competitive students spread over the class. Nothing quite as satisfactory as watching the lights go out when a pre-med’s career prospects get ranked over a B in organic chemistry. Leave the professor’s attention for those of us who are here to learn, not for those who merely want to collect As.

Agreed, but that argument is more relevant to argue along the lines of how many in-state vs. out-of-state/international students you can educate. (Even then it's murky -- I can argue the international students both bring additional funding and add diversity which improves the learning experiences of in-state students).

Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans (required by law), it's just a question of how they select people. The university wants to select the strongest students holistically (which some additional diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you argue the people are owed a state education, either criterion is a valid way to select the students that attend.

If you consume media or follow university rankings they exist only for prestige, whatever that is.