Once a year, a line of briefcase-wielding accountants in business suits files into an office at Texas Christian University.
They’re not there to check on income or expenditures. They’re auditing the admissions statistics.
Texas Christian’s dean of admission says it’s the nation’s only university to voluntarily have its admissions data — the number of applicants and their SAT scores, class rank, grade-point averages and other measures — audited for accuracy. It’s done it for the last dozen years. And not just for show.
As consumers and the federal government push for greater transparency about such things as cost, average debt and job-placement rates, major universities have been getting caught misrepresenting those and other numbers to improve the way they look to prospective students.
“We on the inside have a pretty good idea of who is reporting accurately and who is not. And quite a few schools appear to be cooking the books,” says Raymond Brown, Texas Christian’s dean of admissions.
That dirty little secret has started to slip out as competition intensifies to attract top students and scale the all-important college rankings. In an admissions battleground on which universities grapple for any advantage, rising by just one number in the U.S. News & World Report rankings leads to a nearly 1 percent increase in applications, a 2011 study at the Harvard Business School found.
In the past year alone, six top colleges and universities have admitted falsifying information sent to the U.S. Department of Education, their own accrediting agencies and U.S. News, whose college rankings remain the nation’s most prominent. Another was caught the year before. For many of the schools, the misrepresentations had gone on for years.
