- 17 Mar, 2021
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Rank Improvement
• Why was Richard Freeland so intent on improving NEU’s rankings?
In 1996, Richard Freeland looked across the sea of crumbling parking lots that was
Northeastern University and saw an opportunity few others could. As the school’s new president, he
had inherited a third-tier, blue-collar, commuter-based university whose defining campus feature
was a collection of modest utilitarian buildings south of Huntington Avenue, with a sprinkling of
newly planted trees.
The university had been a victim of many things, most notably federal cutbacks—rolled out in
the mid-’80s—that had left many colleges scrambling for money to close their budget gaps. These
cutbacks, combined with dwindling enrollment, had forced Northeastern’s previous president, Jack
Curry, to slash the budget and cut 875 jobs in the early 1990s. When he announced the layoffs to his
staff, Curry burst into tears. “To say it was an institution in turmoil would be an understatement,”
says a vice provost from that time.
But Freeland, the man who had helped successfully launch UMass Boston over the previous
two decades, had a plan. Freeland believed that if Northeastern could justify its increased costs to
students and parents, it could be saved. And one gauge consistently determined a college’s value: its
position on the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” rankings. Freeland observed how schools
ranked highly received increased visibility and prestige, stronger applicants, more alumni giving,
and, most important, greater revenue potential. A low rank left a university scrambling for money.
This single list, Freeland determined, had the power to make or break a school.
During his tenure, Curry had made improvements at Northeastern, but none of these
changes could budge the school’s U.S. News ranking. Working with the mantra “Smaller but better,”
Curry reduced class sizes and clamped down on admissions. He also tried to attract students from
beyond Boston by creating a more welcoming campus, replacing some of the crumbling blacktops
with new buildings, including a library and a recreation center. From the U.S. Newsperspective,
these changes did little to influence the school’s reputation, the most statistically important metric in
the ranking system. Curry left the school in 1996 at number 162.
Freeland swept into Northeastern with a brand-new mantra: recalibrate the school to climb
up the ranks. “There’s no question that the system invites gaming,” Freeland tells me. “We made a
systematic effort to influence [the outcome].” He directed university researchers to break theU.S.
News code and replicate its formulas. He spoke about the rankings all the time—in hallways and at
board meetings, illustrating his points with charts. He spent his days trying to figure out how to get
the biggest bump up the charts for his buck. He worked the goal into the school’s strategic plan. “We
had to get into the top 100,” Freeland says. “That was a life-or-death matter for Northeastern.”
Founded in the 1930s and 1940s by David Lawrence as two separate newsweeklies, U.S.
News and World Report merged in 1948, but it wasn’t until 1983 that the publication printed its first
cover story ranking America’s top 50 colleges. The issue happened to coincide with a sudden robust
interest in higher education among the general population: Between 1970 and 1983, college
enrollment increased 47 percent. What had once been considered a privilege for the wealthy or
brilliant few was increasingly becoming the entry fee to the middle class. For the first time, a college
degree was considered necessary, but how to choose among the thousands of institutions conferring
degrees? Thus followed a new demand for unbiased, quantitative information—just as Consumer
Reports rated washing machines, college rankings would serve as a first-time buyer’s guide to higher
ed.2
Along with the U.S. News list, the New York Times had just released Edward Fiske’s first Guide to
Colleges, and in 1984, the College Board began regularly selling SAT prep books. But none had the
authority of U.S. News. Billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman seized the moment and purchased the
magazine, along with its rankings franchise, in 1984.
In the offices of U.S. News & World Report in Washington, DC, Robert Morse has labored for
decades, crunching numbers for college rankings (this year, they’ll be released on September 9). He
spends his days staring at two computer monitors, analyzing the data that schools submitted over the
summer. For a man whose life’s work triggers a yearly cage match among universities, Morse is far
from intimidating. He slouches and shuffles, letting the plastic dry-cleaner clips on his shirt go
unnoticed. Yet as chief data strategist and developer of U.S. News’s secret rankings sauce, Morse has
helped the magazine become one of the most feared and influential voices in the world of higher
education.
When the U.S. News editors first devised a formula that declared, with statistical accuracy,
which school was on top, they quantified something previously thought to be intangible. For
generations, colleges and universities had generally relied on a mysterious brew of prestige and
reputation. Suddenly, legacies and tradition—qualities that had taken decades, and sometimes
centuries, for schools to cultivate—were less important than cold, hard data. Schools that once relied
on children of alumni and word of mouth were exposed by their own stats, including graduation and
retention rates, admissions data (acceptance rate, average SAT score), academics (class size, number
of full-time faculty), and reputation (peer reviews). Needless to say, U.S. News’s college rankings
landed on the world of higher education with a thud.
With their authoritative tone, the rankings also introduced new possibilities. Before they
appeared, it was doubtful that NU could ever rub shoulders with Boston College or Harvard. But
now, with a codified system out there, nearly everything was reduced to numbers. And those
numbers could be beat. “They give you a playing field on which you can play,” Freeland says of the
rankings. They give schools “a way to compete.”
From the start, schools have argued that the rankings are subjective. Defenders of the
rankings maintain that the system exposes students to more schools and helps the consumer
compare products. Regardless, students, graduate schools, and employers have embraced the list,
giving it unprecedented power. An unintended result, however, is that schools need to spend more to
stay competitive in the categories that U.S. News considers important. Universities may be in the
business of education, but it’s a competitive business in which all compete for students and revenue.
With an arms race to the top, higher education has soared out of reach for an increasing number of
Americans. NU tuition alone in 1989 was $9,500; today it’s $42,534.
“You can love us or hate us, but we’re not going away,” says U.S. News editor Brian Kelly.
“University officials realized we’re much more valuable to them than not.” He deflects criticism,
saying, “It’s not up to us to solve problems. We’re just putting data out there.” He does, however,
admit that the rankings system can be gamed.
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?’”
Figuring out how much Northeastern needed to adjust was one thing; actually doing it was
another. Point by point, senior staff members tackled different criteria, always with an eye toU.S.
News’s methodology. Freeland added faculty, for instance, to reduce class size. “We did play other
kinds of games,” he says. “You get credit for the number of classes you have under 20 [students], so
we lowered our caps on a lot of our classes to 1