Rankings Ruckus at Clemson
A former Clemson institutional researcher has just given an eye-opening presentation that described how the US News college rankings drove the agenda of Clemson's administration. The measures taken ranged from promising (decreases in class sizes and increases in admissions standards) to unethical (allegations that employees lowballed other institutions in US News's reputational surveys).
Regardless of the steps taken, it's crazy that a magazine has such sway over a university. Judging from the comments, Clemson is by no means alone - they're just more up front about what they are doing.
Preventing this kind of gaming is one of the reasons we set up the phds.org rankings the way we did. Allowing people to set their own weights for different criteria and using outcome measures rather than focusing primarily on input measures makes it much harder to game the system.
