Claremont McKenna College, an expensive, 1,300-student private school in Southern California, has been falsifying SAT scores since 2005 to get better rankings from for-profit ranking companies such as U.S. News & World Report.

In the search for greater prestige – a Top 10 ranking – an official at the college inflated scores, and apparently nobody was checking up – either at the college or at the for-profit ranking companies.

The New York Times broke the story and reported that the college president e-mailed staff and students on Monday, saying that "a senior administrator" had taken responsibility for falsifying the scores and resigned his post.

For the college, where annual costs run $60,000 per student, high rankings bring in strong applicants and donations. For the ranking companies, the dough continues to roll in. What's to question?

Next to buying a home, selecting a college or university is one of the most important decisions that families make. Students and their parents deserve better.

They should be able to find out – from a reliable, publicly available source – key data about colleges and universities.

They should be able to find objective, verifiable information such as tuition and room and board costs, total enrollment, SAT scores and grade-point averages of students accepted, first-year student retention, six-year graduation rates and the like.

For example, the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education should do a much better job of making the common data that all colleges and universities already submit each year much more accessible and user- friendly to students and parents.

The current for-profit rankings industry – launched by U.S. News and World Report in 1983 – has become highly incestuous, with colleges and universities providing information about themselves, including ratings of their own and competing institutions' "reputations," a highly subjective category that invites abuse. Then those who garner top ranks can pay to display a "best colleges" badge.

The Claremont McKenna scandal isn't the first. Inside Higher Education has reported others. In one, an official at Clemson University gave low scores to other universities on the "reputational" survey to make Clemson look better. In another, the University of Southern California submitted false information about the number of faculty who were members of the National Academy of Engineering, helping it to land among top engineering graduate schools.

Pamela Gann, president of Claremont McKenna College, told Inside Higher Education in 2007 that "for-profit publications and rankings are what they are in our free-market economy, with open competition enhanced through freedom of speech and expression of ideas."

But colleges and universities themselves don't have to sustain the industry and become obsessed with the rankings.

In the end, this is about some colleges and universities being so in thrall with top rankings that they are willing to overlook truth and accuracy.

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