Given the myriad ways that our “elite” colleges and universities massage and manipulate admissions data, financial aid data, yield data, alumni giving data, who teaches classes, and so on (often in order to increase their “profits”, often in order to stay high up in the rankings, etc.), how can we take seriously the idea that they are the active promoters of the public good? If, at the very core, our universities and colleges are manipulating and deceiving students, families, taxpayers and onlookers about how selective they really are, about how their finances are really working, about what it takes to be admitted to a college and so on, what gives us any confidence that the rest of the enterprise is operating the “way we think” it should be running?
