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<p>Well I’m flattered, hawkette. But only up to a point. As GoBlue81’s post shows, many privates do as much of this as the publics, and with less valid reasons. The only figure that counts, really, is transfers as a percentage of the entering class: Georgetown’s 227 transfers will have a greater impact on its reported US News stats than Michigan’s 779, due to the differential in class size. And GoBlue81 is also absolutely right that most state flagships are under a statutory obligation to take qualified transfers from in-state community colleges. They’re not taking transfers in order to cut the size of their entering class and thereby game the US News numbers, they’re doing it because by law they have to. Privates like Cornell, NYU, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Penn, Rochester, Vanderbilt, Rice, et al. are under no such statutory obligation (though I’m not sure about Cornell; possibly its quasi-public “contract colleges” are under such an obligation). This immediately raises suspicions about “gaming.”</p>
<p>But what about my broader point, hawkette? The so-called “objective” metrics relied upon by US News are vulnerable to the most outrageous forms of manipulation. They’re pretty much junk because they’re so easily gamed. It’s all bogus. And frankly, it’s really counterproductive to the mission of higher education that so many college and university presidents, provosts, deans, and other responsible officers spend so much time and effort devising creative new ways to game these rankings because they feel have no real choice; they’re locked in what is called in game theory a “prisoner’s dilemma,” believing if they don’t game the rankings their competitors will and they and their institutions will be played for suckers, and as a result suffer in recruiting the students they want.</p>
<p>I maintain the US News rankings—and especially the so-called “objective” portions of the US News rankings (as the PA is only what it purports to be, an opinion survey, nothing more, nothing less)—are not only useless, but downright pernicious. Do you agree with that? If not, I don’t accept your selective endorsement of one part of what I say, taken out of context and applied in a transparently biased way, by misleadingly listing absolute numbers rather than the relevant figure here, percentages of the student body.</p>