Do Colleges Identify or Develop Intelligence

Most colleges, especially those wanting to be "top-tier" (i.e., ranked in the top tier of the various rankings), place a tremendous emphasis on recruiting "the best" students; after all, those students are usually motivated and easy to teach. However, the fact that colleges emphasize recruiting smart students much more than developing smart students has important consequences. The rankings of colleges and universities are influenced heavily by the academic quality of the students that colleges recruit; that's why some of the most heavily-weighted factors in the rankings are students' SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, class rank, and grade point average.This emphasis on recruiting the best students is reported in popular magazines, such as U.S. News & World Report, that rate the quality of U.S. colleges and universities (Crissey, 1997). These ratings are based on a variety of factors, ranging from library holdings to endowment and alumni giving. The rankings are very influential; indeed, the "rankings issues" of these magazines are invariably the magazines' best-sellers, selling almost twice as many copies as a typical issue (Gottlieb, 1999; Kersten, 2000), and many parents use the rankings as a quick and easy way to sort information when deciding where to send their children to college (Kersten, 2000; Levin, 2003). Realizing the profits that can be made in the college-bound market, magazines such as Time, Money, and Newsweek all now publish "college rankings issues" each year (Crissey, 1997). Even paperback-book versions of the ratings summaries sell a million copies (Gottlieb, 1999).Another View of the "Ratings Race"Inherent in the many academic rankings of colleges and universities is an explicit disdain for students who aren't necessarily the "best and brightest." Administrators at elite schools (i.e., schools ranked high by U.S. News & World Report), as well as those at schools wanting to be elite schools, know that admitting underprepared students lowers a school's academic ranking. Although having programs to help these underprepared students does not affect other courses, the elitism and accompanying contempt for underprepared students is often explicit. For example, many faculty view the teaching of at-risk, underprepared students as being unglamorous, unimportant, and demeaning (Astin, 2000), and many faculty and administrators worry that admitting underprepared students will reduce the school's academic standards. As noted by Texas A&M University's former president Ray Bowen, "I'm concerned that people who want to come to school here, who have high SAT scores, don't feel that they are diminished [by nonelite students]" (Selingo & Brainard, 2001, p. A21). Astin (2000) is more explicit:The underprepared student is a kind of pariah in American higher education, and some of the reasons are obvious. Since most of us believe that the excellence of our departments and of our institutions depends on enrolling the very best-prepared students that we can, to admit underprepared students would pose a real threat to our excellence, (p. 131)To avoid the damaging effects of underprepared students on a school's reputation, these schools simply exclude them from campus, much like many high schools exclude the scores of at-risk students to ensure that the schools' average scores on assessment tests are high (Olson, 2002).Although public colleges and universities have the ability to focus important resources on civic life in America, issues such as civic responsibility, citizenship, and similar topics directly related to civic engagement are seldom mentioned in discussions of curriculum reform, and are seldom considered by publications such as U.S. News & World Report in their rankings of colleges and universities (Astin, 2000). The various ranking systems also ignore the societal purposes of education. For example, the ranking systems give no credit to a school for achieving a diverse campus, producing a family's first generation of college graduates, recruiting and graduating minority students, or recruiting and retaining minority faculty. …