Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

This is what has happened in high...

The journalists at U.S. News, though, were grappling with “educational excellence,”

They had no direct way to quantify how a four-year process affected one single student, much less tens of millions of them.

They couldn’t measure learning, happiness, confidence, friendships, or other aspects of a stu...

President Lyndon Johnson’s ideal for high...

a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity and increased personal reward”...

Instead they picked proxies that seemed to correl...

They looked at SAT scores, student-teacher ratios, and...

They analyzed the percentage of incoming freshmen who made it to sophomore year and the percen...

They calculated the percentage of living alumni who contributed money to their alma mater, surmising that if they gave a college money there was a good c...

Three-quarters of the ranking would be produced by an algorithm—an opinion formalized in code—tha...

In the other quarter, they would factor in the subjective views of college official...

However, as the ranking grew into a national standard, a vicious feedback loop materialized.

The trouble was that the rankings were self-reinforcing.

If a college fared badly in U.S. News, its reputation would suffer, and condi...

Top students would avoid it, as would t...

Alumni would howl and cut back on c...

The ranking would tumble further. The ranking, in sh...

If you look at this development from the perspective of a university president, it’s actually quite sad.

Most of these people no doubt cherished their own college experience—that’s part of what motivated them to climb the academic ladder.

Yet here they were at the summit of their careers dedicating enormous energy toward boosting performance in fifteen areas defined by a group of j...

They were almost like students again, angling for good grades...

In fact, they were trapped by a rigid...

If the U.S. News list had turned into a moderate success, there ...

But instead it grew into a titan, quickly establishing itself as ...

It has been tying our education system into knots ever since, establishing a rigid to-do list for college adm...

The U.S. News college ranking has great scale, inflicts widespread damage, and generates an almost endless spira...

While it’s not as opaque as many other models, it is stil...

Some administrators have gone to desperate lengths to dr...

Baylor University paid the fee for admitted students to retake the SAT, hoping another try would boost the...

Elite small schools, including Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and California’s Claremont McKenna, sent false data to U.S. News, inflating th...

And Iona College, in New York, acknowledged in 2011 that its employees had fudged numbers about nearly everything: test scores, acceptance and graduation rates, freshman rete...

The lying paid off, at least for a while. U.S. News estimated that the false data had lifted Iona from fiftieth to thirtieth place amo...

The great majority of college administrators looked for less egregious ways to...

Instead of cheating, they worked hard to improve each of the metrics that went into their score. They could argue that this was ...

After all, if they worked to satisfy the U.S. News algorithm, they’d raise more money, attract brighter students and profe...

Was there really an...

when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it.

This is because proxies are easier to manipulate than the complicated reality they represent.

Winning athletic programs, it turns out, are the most effective promotions for some applicants.

TCU’s strategy worked.

By 2013, it was the second most selective university in Texas, trailing only prestigious Rice University in Houston.

The problem isn’t the U.S. News model but its scale.

It forces everyone to shoot for exactly the same goals, which creates a rat race—and lots of harmful unintended consequences.

if they raised prices, they’d have more resources for addressing the areas where they were being measured.

Tuition has skyrocketed ever since.

Between 1985 and 2013, the cost of higher education rose by more than 500 percent, nearly four ...

To attract top students, colleges, as we saw at TCU, have gone on building booms, featuring glass-walled student centers, luxury dorms, and gyms ...

This would all be wonderful for students and might enhance their college experience—if they weren’t the ones paying for it, in the form of student ...

Our entire society has embraced not only the idea that a college education is essential but the idea that a degree from a highly ranked school can catapult a...