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

by Cathy O'Neil

The U.S. News WMD fed on these beliefs, fears...

It created powerful incentives that have encouraged spending while turning a blind eye to sky...

The result is an education system that favors the privileged.

It tilts against needy students, locking out the great majority of them—and pushing them down a path toward poverty.

It deepens the socia...

But even those who claw their way into a top c...

If you think about it, the college admissions game, while lucrative for some, has virtu...

The complex and fraught production simply re-sorts and reranks the very same pool of eighteen-year...

They don’t master important skills by jumping through many more hoops or writing meticulously targeted college essays under the ...

All of them, from the rich to the working class, are simply being trained to fit into an enormo...

And at the end of the ordeal, many of them will be saddled with debt that will ...

They’re pawns in an arms race, and it’s a particu...

So is there...

During his second term, President Obama suggested coming up with a new college rankings model, one more in tune with national priorities and middl...

His secondary goal was to sap power from for-profit colleges (a money-sucking scourge that we’ll ...

Obama’s idea would be to tie a college ranking system to a different set of metrics, including affordability, the percentage of poor and minority st...

Like the U.S. News ranking, it would also consider...

If colleges dipped below the minimums in these categories, they’d get cut off from the $180 billion-per-year federal student loan market (which the for-p...

All of those sound like worthy goals, to be sure, but every ranking...

And when that happens, it creates new and different feedback loops and a host of ...

It’s easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by l...

Many students struggle with math and science prerequisites an...

Water down those requirements, and more student...

But if one goal of our educational system is to produce more scientists and technologists for a globa...

It would also be a cinch to pump up the income numbe...

All colleges would have to do is shrink their liberal arts programs, and get rid of education departments and social work departments while they’re at it, since teachers and social workers make less mo...

But they’re no less valuable ...

It also wouldn’t be too hard to ...

One approach already gaining popularity is to lower the percentage of tenured faculty, replacing these expensive professors, as they retire,...

For some departments at some universities, this m...

But there are...

Tenured faculty, working with graduate students, power important research and set the stand...

whereas harried adjuncts, who might teach five courses at three colle...

rarely have the time or energy to deliver more than co...

Another possible approach, that of removing unnecessary administrative positi...

The number of “graduates employed nine months after graduation” can be gamed too.

A New York Times report in 2011 focused on law schools, which are already evaluated by their ability to position their students for careers.

Say a newly minted lawyer with $150,000 in student loans is w...

For some unscrupulous law schools investigated by the Times, he ...

Some schools went further, hiring their own graduates for hourly temp jobs just as the crucial n...

Others sent out surveys to recent alumni and counted all those that didn’t...

Perhaps it was just as well that the Obama administration failed to come up with a rejiggered ranking system.

The pushback by college presidents was fierce.

After all, they had spent decades optimizing themselves to satisf...

A new formula based on graduation rates, class size, alumni employment and income, and other metrics could wreak havoc ...

No doubt they also made good points about the vulnerabilities of any new model and the new feedb...

So the government cap...

And the result might ...

Instead of a ranking, the Education Department released loads o...

The result is that students can ask their own questions about the things that matter to them—including class size, graduation rates, and the a...