Did Clemson game the U.S. News rankings?

Everyone knows colleges work overtime to make themselves look as good as possible to U.S. News, but a Clemson University staff member recently offered an unusually frank explanation of how rankings-gaming works -- allegedly -- at her institution.

Speaking itn Atlanta at a conference for members of the Association for Institutional Research, Catherine Watt, until recently in charge of assembling data requested by U.S. News (she has since moved to a different staff job), had the audience gasping at some of the actions she described, according to Inside Higher Education.

Clemson's president has a goal of moving Clemson onto U.S. News's list of the top 20 public research universities, an ambition that has put great stress on the number-crunching staff, Watt said.

To be sure, some of what she described was fairly innocuous: alumni are encouraged to give the college as little as $1 annually, in order to goose the proportion of alumni donors, which the magazine uses as a measure of alumni satisfaction. (My own college does this, as I'm sure do many others.)

Clemson's is also pursuing a more elite student body each year-- higher GPAs, higher SATs -- drawing criticism from some conference attendees, who suggested that that approach compromised the university's mission as a public, land-grandt institution.

More dubiously, the university increased the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 people mainly by moving bodies around, Watt said. It let classes with 50 people swell to 60 or 70, she said, so that others could shrink from, say, 25 to 19. "Two or three students here and there, what a difference it can make," Watt said.

Then Watt shocked the audience by saying that, on surveys distributed by U.S. News,, the Clemson brass "rates all programs other than Clemson below average," adding: "And I'm confident my president is not the only one who does that." (The online magazine said Watt seemed aware of the cynicism of what she was describing, and not entirely happy with it.)

Whether because of improved quality or tricks, Clemson's on the march: since 2001, it has leapt from 38th to 22nd in its U.S. News category.

So is Clemson's conduct -- as described by Watt -- outrageous and an outlier? Or does the college's distinctiveness lie chiefly in the loose-lippedness of its staff?

PS I hear that Clemson has issued a statement rebutting Watts's claims. When I find it, I'll post it.

UPDATE: Clemson has issued a statement calling Watts's comments, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, "outrageous" and false. Jim Barker, the university's president, said: "In 2001, we adopted a set of 10-year goals -- 27 in all -- to improve quality, and those goals are driving decisions at Clemson. About a half-dozen of these goals correspond with US News ranking criteria. The majority do not." And Dori Helms, Clemson's provost, said: "We would not tolerate any efforts to manipulate data, and neither President Barker nor I would manipulate the data in ranking other institutions."