PLAYING THE NUMBERS

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

In a nation obsessed with being No. 1, and with quantifying the unquantifiable, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would attempt to rate colleges as if they were cars. And in an era when one year at a private college costs an average of $15,532 -- and all but the very top schools are scrambling to attract high school seniors -- it was also inevitable that the business of ranking colleges would become an influential and competitive one.

With numbers, however, comes number crunching, and sometimes even number "massaging." In a front-page story last week, the Wall Street Journal raised anew assertions that in order to improve their rankings in such annual college listings published by U.S. News & World Report, Money magazine, as well as Barron's, dozens of schools have been inflating the sat scores of the freshman class and manipulating graduation rates. Some schools are choosing not to average in the scores of foreign students, for example; others simply cut out some of the lower scores at will. But when the schools want to borrow money by selling bonds, they are required by law to provide accurate information to investment services such as Moody's, and suddenly the scores seem less impressive, or at least different. "Most of this is a great scam," says Bob Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a Cambridge, Massachusetts organization that is opposed to using the sat for admission decisions. "More than a third of the colleges in the country will admit any living body."

School administrators contacted by TIME responded to the Journal report with fingers pointed right back at the guidebook publishers. "Excessive simplification of tables will penalize an institution with outreach," says William M. Shain, dean of admissions at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, which excludes sat scores of 25 out of 50 international students in a freshman class of 450. "A 390 verbal score is different in Istanbul than Cleveland." When trying to judge the quality of a liberal-arts college, says Nancy Dye, president of Ohio's Oberlin College, "surveys like U.S. News's don't help. They emphasize the wrong issues, the wrong questions and the wrong criteria."

Still, colleges go to great lengths to fill out the questionnaires sent to them by the guidebook publishers. "Twenty years ago, the admissions director might have said, 'I'll take care of that when I can,'" says Frederic Siegel, director of admissions at George Washington University in Washington: "We absolutely can't afford to do that because our clients place great weight on it." They also keep in touch with the publishers. Jillian Kasky, associate editor for the Money guide, which rates colleges as "best buys," says that a representative from New College of the University of South Florida called last fall and asked what would happen to its No. 1 ranking if the school raised its tuition. Her response was noncommittal. Gordon Michalson Jr., dean and warden of New College, says the school would only have been looking for "scuttlebutt"-as a part of the state university system the school has no control over its tuition. Fees did not go up, and New College remained No. 1.

Some guidebook publishers acknowledge that chances to fudge exist. "It's not out of the realm of possibility that a desperate institution will do desperate things," says Al Sanoff, managing editor of the college project at U.S. News, which prints a million copies of its guide each year. But as those fat envelopes pour into homes this week, parents and high school seniors will have to face a more complex question, one which U.S. News poses in its guide: "Why aren't schools ranked according to what students learn while in college?" --Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, John Moody, Marguerite Michaels and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN/WASHINGTON, JOHN MOODY, MARGUERITE MICHAELS AND ELIZABETH RUDOLPH/NEW YORK