<p>A few more:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Jack up tuition and recycle 100% of the additional revenue into increased financial aid, thus keeping the net cost to students and the net revenue to the college constant. This will produce a higher nominal through-put of money, higher nominal “expenditures,” and therefore higher expenditures per student, which will boost your “financial resources” score.</p></li>
<li><p>Target merit aid (and for that matter, need-based grants to the extent you have discretion in how they’re allocated) not to the most highly qualified admits, but to those just above your target 75th and 25th percentile SAT scores. Why waste a lot of money trying to lure an applicant with 1600 SAT CR + M who you’re probably going to lose to Harvard anyway, when you have a better chance at nailing down the kid with the 1420 SATs who will do just as much to get your 75th percentile SAT CR + M over 1400—and who will be much more grateful for the attention and the aid award?</p></li>
<li><p>Cut the size of your freshman class by 20% and fill those empty seats with an equal number of transfer students. That will allow you to be more “selective” at the freshman level, with a lower admit rate and higher median SATs and class rank, and the beauty part is, the transfer students’ SATs and class rank don’t count in the U.S. News rankings! Brilliant! You can actually more toward a more mediocre student body, while looking like you’re doing just the opposite! And it won’t cost you a dime because the lost tuition revenue from a smaller freshman class will be matched dollar-for-dollar by new transfers—indeed, you might even save a little on FA because many schools don’t promise to meet 100% of need for transfers. No adverse effect on student-faculty ratios, either!</p></li>
<li><p>Break up that 100-person lecture class taught by a full professor (with discussion subsections led by TAs) into 6 small classes each capped at 19 students, including one “honors” section taught by the professor (who will be grateful to have a small class and only the best students) and 5 regular sections taught by TAs. This will give you one less “large” class and 6 new “small” classes (the discussions subsections of the large lecture didn’t count as “classes” but if you eliminate the lecture you can count each small 19-person section, most now taught entirely by the TA, as a “class”). No matter that 80% of the students no longer have any contact with the professor and are instead taught by grad students; that apparently doesn’t figure into the US News rankings. If you want to carry it a step further, you could re-designate the TAs as “instructors” or “lecturers” and list them as part-time “faculty.” This will hurt you a little in the the part of the rankings that credits you for a higher percentage of full-time faculty (5% of “faculty resources” score); but that’s more than compensated by your improved student-faculty ratio (TAs don’t count as “faculty” for this purpose but part-time “instructors” or “lecturers” do; this factor represents 5% of "faculty resources score), enhanced percentage of “small” classes (30% of “faculty resources” score), and reduced percentage of “large” classes (10% of “faculty resources” score). </p></li>
<li><p>Create a two-track faculty system. Boost the salaries and benefits of tenured and tenure-track professors, give them a generous sabbatical leave policy, and minimize their undergraduate teaching load. This will allow you to retain and attract big-name “stars” in the academic world, probably the single most important thing you can do to boost your PA score (25% of total US News ranking); and the more you pay them, the more it also boosts your average faculty compensation, which counts for a whopping 35% of your “faculty resources” score, which in turn counts for 20% of your total US News ranking. No matter that these big stars don’t actually teach undergraduates; nothing in the US News rankings measures whether they’re the ones doing the teaching, and the administrators at other schools filling out the PA surveys are not going to bother to check whether the big stars at their peer institutions are teaching undergrads or not.</p></li>
<li><p>Then who’s going to teach the undergrads? Well, a lower caste of lower-paid and untenured “adjuncts,” “instructors,” and “lecturers,” most part-time, some full-time, whom you can hire far more cheaply than a big name in the field; in fact, you can easily pick up 6 or 7 part-timers at modest pay and few if any fringe benefits for the price of one full professor, and have each part-times teach 2 classes per year for a total of 12-14 small classes per year, as opposed to the 3 max you’d get out of a full professor. Won’t this bring down your average faculty compensation? Well, no; U.S. News calculates “faculty compensation” on the basis of “average faculty pay and benefits” paid to “full-time assistant, associate, and full professors”—the part-time adjuncts, instructors, and lecturers just don’t figure into the calculation (indeed, given this definition it’s not even clear that a full-time non-tenure track “lecturer” counts for purposes of determining average faculty compensation, but I’d say probably not). Yet the school gets to count each part-timer as 1/3 of a faculty member for purposes of determining its student-faculty ratio, so the 6 part-timers you hired for the price of one full professor count as 2 faculty in the s-f ratio! Brilliant! With a chronic oversupply of Ph.D.s in many fields, many of these people will be grateful for the work, and if you pay them on a “piecework” per-course basis they’ll happily carry even larger teaching loads. No matter that they’re not the top people in their field, or that they’re a high-turnover group of academic migrant workers. This is just a numbers game. U.S. News has no way of measuring the quality of instruction in the classroom; consequently, the ruthless college administrator need not worry about it, at least not nearly as much as she needs to worry about the numbers.</p></li>
</ul>