Administration questions new ranking site’s methodology

When U.S. News & World Report released its latest college rankings in September, placing Princeton and Harvard atop the list, the annual storm of criticism of the ranking methodology once again appeared on blogs and op-ed pages all across the country.

Partly in response to these criticisms, two Princeton alumni are launching an online service intended to provide college applicants with a more accurate method of assessing the quality of a particular institution and deciding which college is right for them. Tom Benghauser ’66 and Mento Soponis ’66 have created College Straight Talk, a website that charges users to access results of alumni satisfaction surveys and use this information to generate personalized college suggestions.

But the validity of the results, as well as the methods Benghauser and Soponis used to obtain them, have been questioned and criticized by administrators at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.

One finding that Benghauser highlighted was the fact that Princeton alumni who indicated that the University was their first choice when applying reported a satisfaction level over 10 percent higher than alumni who said Princeton was not their first choice. Additionally, he and Soponis found that these so-called “second choicers” were less likely to have donated to their alma mater and, when they did, they contributed less money.

In an email to The Daily Princetonian, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye disputed these findings.

“The data Princeton has collected over many years does not support the findings in this report with respect to either student satisfaction or annual giving,” Rapelye wrote.

In an email to Rapelye in mid-October, Benghauser requested her office’s help in obtaining demographic data on these “second choicers” in order to figure out how to improve their college experiences. In response, Rapelye asserted that an applicant’s perceived or expressed preference does not play a role in her office’s decision to admit them.

“My responsibility is to shape the very best class I can from among the students who apply each year, and in doing this I do not base decisions on whether Princeton is a student’s ‘first choice,’ ” Rapelye wrote in her response to Benghauser. “First of all, this is frequently difficult to determine, and many applicants simply don’t know enough at the point of application to make a sensible decision about whether they have a first choice or to base that choice on solid grounds.”

Rapelye explained in her email to Benghauser that, in her experience, she has met students who attend a school they had thought of as a first choice but later decided they would have been happier somewhere else, as well as with students who end up very happy at a school they had not considered a top choice while applying.

In subsequent emails to the ‘Prince,’ Rapelye said that after admitting a class that she and her colleagues find most likely to take advantage of what Princeton has to offer, they provide admitted applicants with as much information as they can through events like Princeton Preview to help them decide whether or not to attend.

“Whether students indicate that Princeton is their first choice or not, it is not a factor in our decision-making,” Rapelye wrote to the ‘Prince.’ “We make many efforts to provide as much information as possible to admitted students so they can make informed decisions about whether Princeton is the right school for them.”

Benghauser said he thinks Princeton’s status as a first-choice school should be taken into account in admissions decisions.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“As an alumnus, I have given thought to the concept of requiring all applicants to sign an oath committing to attend Princeton if they are admitted,” Bengauser said in an email, though he noted that his data suggested that this policy could lead to other negative consequences.

While Benghauser said he and Soponis ultimately hope to provide information about hundreds of institutions, in designing the beta version of the product, they sent survey questions to nearly 4,500 recent graduates of five colleges and universities — Princeton, Penn, Tufts, Mt. Holyoke and Kenyon.

They received over 1,100 responses to the voluntary, non-incentivized survey, which put the data within a 5 percent margin of error, according to Benghauser.

Benghauser — who spent a large part of his career assessing customer satisfaction related to automobile purchases — attended Penn Law School and used his access to Princeton’s and Penn’s alumni databases to obtain the contact information of alumni from the classes of 2006-2010.

The use of these databases for commercial purposes is a violation of both universities’ terms of usage. Penn rescinded his access to the database after noticing an unusual amount of activity, while Princeton blocked his account after reading of his use of the data in an article on College Straight Talk in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Oct. 31.