major national health crisis has validated the fact that he not only is not up to the job, but that he also has no interest in it. Rather than digging in to do the job of the president of the United States, he has instead spent the entirety of his presidency fluffing the Trump brand.
Now, when a college or university becomes a “brand,” it is not de facto a bad thing. When brands reflect an authentic underlying reality, when being good at the thing your organization does is good for the brand, brand and organization are a virtuous partnership. If it really was true, as Trump claimed about himself during the 2016 campaign, that “I alone can fix it,” and he actually did fix things, he would have become quite popular.
In the era before the US News rankings, colleges and universities were not so much brands as they were “types.” The elite were the elite. Flagship state universities were generally interchangeable. Regional publics were all “good schools.” There may have been slight differences in selectivity or the test scores of incoming students for similar types of institutions across states, but these reflected regional differences, not some inherent special quality of the institution itself.
But the US News rankings provided a blueprint by which institutions of the same type could improve their brand relative to the other schools in their close cohort. Institutions could also strive to move up in terms of their class. Unfortunately, the disconnect between the rankings’ criteria and what is actually good for the quality of education created a classic case of what is known as Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.” Because the US News rankings are almost exclusively a measure of inputs, rather than outputs, influencing the rankings merely requires schools to figure out how to admit the kind of students who will bolster their ratings.
I saw this process take shape firsthand during my years as a non-tenure-track lecturer at Clemson University between 2005 and 2011. Upon assuming the Clemson presidency in 2001, James F. Barker declared a goal of moving the university from thirty-eighth place into the top twenty of US News’s public university rankings, a rather bold pronouncement given the low probability that other institutions would falter themselves. Clemson would have to leap over them. And as Catherine Watt, an institutional researcher at the university during this era, recounted, Clemson’s quest largely involved finding more and more creative ways to juke the stats.4
In order to boost faculty salaries, Clemson increased student tuition and started including the cost of benefits to the data they reported to US News. The school rejiggered accounting practices in order to report the most favorable financial information to the ranking board, even though that information was all on paper and ultimately meaningless to the university’s on-the-ground operations.
Since class sizes below twenty were a key element in the rankings, Clemson lowered the enrollments of as many twenty- and twenty-five-person classes as it could. But it simultaneously increased the enrollments of classes with fifty-five students to seventy. Most infamously, in order to give Clemson’s relative rating a boost, Watt reported that school officials participating in the reputational survey rated every other program in the entire country “below average.”5 She also remarked that she believed other schools were doing this as well, quoting a colleague who said, “People don’t have this as their official vision, but by God, it’s their unofficial vision.” Some other schools dispensed with the machinations altogether and simply lied. For example, between 2005 and 2011, Claremont McKenna College submitted false SAT scores in order to boost its ranking.6
During this time, I recall an official from Clemson’s provost’s office inviting all non-tenure-track lecturers to a meeting, a rare occasion indeed. In the English department at the time, non-tenure-track faculty taught more than 70 percent of the total course offerings; each of us made $25,000 a year for teaching four courses per semester. Some of the lucky ones (including me) were eligible for health insurance. Others were not. The provost office official had a proposal: because the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees mattered in the rankings, wouldn’t it be a great idea if those of us without terminal degrees pursued a PhD in our spare time?
We had questions. Would Clemson help fund these pursuits? No. Would there be new titles or raises if we completed these programs? No. So why would we want to spend our time doing this? For the rankings!
Clemson ultimately did reach its goal. The school hit number twenty in 2015 before falling back to number twenty-three the following year. Currently, they’re at number twenty-nine. Admittedly, the school’s machinations did result in some improved metrics. Freshman retention increased from 82 to 89 percent, and the graduation rate rose from 72 to 78 percent. But unfortunately, those improvements came coupled with a move away from the mission of providing access to educational opportunities for the citizens of South Carolina. This pattern has played out at public universities and colleges across the country.
Country Club Public Universities
A 2018 report7 from New America, a nonpartisan—though more like a center-with-an-essence-of-left-leaning—think tank, illustrates how the chase for prestige in a privatized higher education marketplace has closed off educational opportunities for low-income students. Authored by New America analyst Stephen Burd, the report shows how the percentage of schools with an average net price—the cost to students after grant and scholarship aid is deducted from tuition and fees—above $10,000 increased from 34 percent in 2010 to 52 percent in 2015. As Burd notes:
Over the last 20 years, state disinvestment and institutional status-seeking have worked together, hand in hand, to encourage public colleges and universities to adopt the enrollment management tactics of their private college counterparts. For many of these schools, that has meant using their institutional aid dollars strategically in order to lure affluent out-of-state students to their campuses, rather than spend these funds on in-state students who can’t afford to go to college without help.
In other words, the chase for prestige has subsumed higher education’s mission of access and opportunity. Merit aid is used as a tool to enroll “desirable” students while aid for low-income families languishes.
Burd identifies a class of what he calls “country-club public universities,” schools that have a low net price but that also admit low numbers of students who are eligible for Pell Grants, a trait that is consistent with using merit aid to enroll desirable students who help in the rankings. Schools with a net price under $10,000 that also enrolled fewer that 15 percent Pell-eligible students include some of the highest ranked public universities in the country: the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the College of William and Mary. These are public colleges where large proportions of the student body are carved out for rich people. At William and Mary, for example, 56 percent of students come from the top 10 percent in terms of household income. Only 2 percent come from the bottom 20 percent.
Burd notes how a commitment to maintaining need-based aid actually hurts institutions in the competitive landscape. The University of Illinois, which still gives the bulk of its aid based on need, has made itself vulnerable to other states’ poaching of Illinois residents. According to Burd, “These carpetbagger recruiters have been remarkably successful. Today, nearly half of all Illinois students leave the state to go to college. That’s up from less than one-third back in 2000.”
Schools who chase prestige but lack the resources of schools like William and Mary or the University of Virginia are not “country-club universities.” They’re just plain expensive. This problem is particularly acute in states where legislatures have largely abandoned support for public institutions. The effect on Pennsylvania schools is particularly striking in this regard. Temple, the University of Pittsburgh, and all of the Penn State campuses have net prices over $16,000 per year. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which enroll large proportions of Pell-eligible students but couple that with high net prices, also
