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BOOK EXCERPT
"Declining by Degrees"
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From "THIS LITTLE STUDENT WENT TO MARKET"
by David L. Kirp
... Almost every institution in the land embraced the U.S. News criteria as its own. The competition for students turned into a donnybrook as universities rushed to claw their way up the ladder. To attract students with the best academic credentials, colleges increasingly award scholarships on the basis of test scores rather than need. Financial aid offers are deployed strategically, to lure more desirable (or reluctant) applicants, rather than to help talented students from poor families attend college. There is greater reliance on admitting students through early decision, not because this makes sense in educational terms but because applicants who are accepted early usually enroll - this makes the college appear more selective, and hence more prestigious.
Historian Roger Geiger has calculated which schools have been the big winners in the star student sweepstakes. Colleges that recorded the largest percentage increases between 1995 and 2000 in enrolling students with 700-plus SAT scores� among them Pennsylvania, Duke, New York University, Boston University, University of Southern California, Washington University (St. Louis), Rochester - excel at what economists (and college presidents) Michael McPherson and Morton Schapiro call the "student aid game." Some universities have ventured into the realm of the unethical, manipulating the system by inflating students' SAT scores and the proportion of alumni donors (a factor in the rankings) - even stooping so low as to recruit applicants who have no chance of being admitted, just to make the school look more selective.
Today, sought-after applicants are treated like pampered consumers whose preferences must be satisfied, not as acolytes whose preferences are being formed in the process of being educated. In this rivalry, much more is at stake than bragging rights for trustees and alumni. Prestige brings tangible benefits, and in this winner-take-all world small differences in reputation have large consequences. Although slippage in the rankings has an immediate impact on the following year's class, the more highly regarded the institution, the more top students and prized professors it attracts and the more readily it can secure the biggest gifts. (It is a truism among fundraisers that money follows money, not need.) Such successes reinforce a school's place in the hierarchy. "To those who have," as the Book of Matthew intones, "more shall be given" - in other words, "the more, the more."
College applicants have responded with alacrity to these signals of status, treating the U.S. News rankings as gospel. What matters most in picking a college, a survey of students at elite schools finds, is not the caliber of the education it delivers but rather its prestige.
Sixties-style idealism has long since given way to pragmatism. These aspirants regard an elite pedigree as their ticket to the new aristocracy. During the past thirty years, the percentage of freshmen that expect their college years will bring them better jobs has quadrupled, from 20 to 80 percent. Meanwhile, those who anticipate that college will help them develop a philosophy of living plummeted by precisely the same extent - from 80 to 20 percent. In 2002 the objective most often identified by male freshmen was "being very well-off financially." These Jay Gatsbys in training do whatever they can - and their families spend whatever it takes - to distinguish themselves from the crowd. They see it as a blue-chip investment. ...
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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