For those at Northeastern, breaking into the U.S. News top 100 was like landing a man on the moon, but Freeland was determined to try. Reverse-engineering the formulas took months; perfecting them took years. “We could say, ‘Well, if we could move our graduation rates by X, this is how it would affect our standing,’” Freeland says. “It was very mathematical and very conscious and every year we would sit around and say, ‘Okay, well here’s where we are, here’s where we think we might be able to do next year, where will that place us?’”
When I chose to attend Northeastern -- under the influence of the truckload of spiffy targeted mail that flooded my parents' mailbox during my latter years in high school -- the school was in the midst of a massive building campaign that extended its footprint into the Roxbury neighborhood, and frequently looking to up admissions standards. Not surprisingly, those were all a part of the rankings puzzle.
The more applications NU could drum up, the more students they could turn away, thus making the school appear more selective... Since studies showed that students who lived on campus were more likely to stay enrolled, the school oversaw the construction of dormitories like those in West Village—a $1 billion, seven-building complex—to improve retention and graduation rates. NU was lucky in this regard—not every urban school in the country had vast land, in the form of decrepit parking lots, on which to build a new, attractive campus.
Amid the push, skeptical students were often told that we should be thankful for these shiny new improvements and lofty rankings, since they would in turn increase the value of our shiny new degrees. Over the long run, they may turn out to be right (assuming, of course, that Bachelor's Degrees retain value). But that doesn't absolve the university for attempting to cheat the system in a manner that has little to do with education.
Along with the U.S. News and World Report's vulnerabilities, NU's tactics also serve as a gentle reminder that the college admissions process is a faceless machine that evaluates an accumulation of numbers (grades, SAT tests, activity loads), rather than the real-life tenacity, guile and heart that are required for anything remotely approaching success in the increasingly dismal and freelance-oriented job market. But don't worry. In the age of YouTube, a video could save us from this morass. From today's Baltimore Sun:
Starting with applicants for next year's class, Goucher announced Thursday that it will give students the option of submitting a video they record in lieu of transcripts or college admission exams.
The Sun reports that some of these admissions videos have already gone viral. Whether they make the infection worse remains to be seen. At the very least, the clips might gum up the works of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, making them less influential. As Kutner points out at the end of the NU article, improving one ranking is likely to come at the peril of another.
In Money magazine’s 2014 “Best Colleges for Your Money....Northeastern landed at the bottom of the third quartile, at number 433.