Summary: Chapters 3–4

Chapter 3: Arms Race: Going to College

O’Neil opens this chapter by asking readers to consider what would happen if everyone in the United States decided to follow the same strict diet. Such a change, she says, would be hugely disruptive to the national economy—yet this is essentially what has happened with college rankings. O’Neil walks through the history of the U.S. News college ranking system and its rise to dominance as a way of comparing universities. She explains that schools have found themselves allocating much of their budget to meeting the specific criteria that U.S. News uses to judge institutions. This means that expensive schools with wealthy alumni are able to remain at the top of the ranking, though the system can be gamed by hiring prominent faculty to teach part-time.

The overemphasis on entrance exams, with their attendant cheating scandals, represents another facet of the college-admissions industry’s fixation with narrowly defined metrics and models. O’Neil observes that the rigid reliance on proxies—indirect measurements—leaves schools and students alike conforming to the model and not to their own standards of excellence.

Chapter 4: Propaganda Machine: Online Advertising

Next, O’Neil examines the targeted advertising that has become extremely prevalent online. She uses for-profit schools, such as the University of Phoenix, as her examples, showing how these organizations reach out to people who are likely eligible for government financial aid. The schools, O’Neil says, then draw prospective students with promises of a better life, induce them to take out student loans, and leave them saddled with considerable debt. In her view, the mathematical models employed by these institutions rank as WMDs—Weapons of Math Destruction—because of their scale and damaging effects. Similar types of “predatory” marketing, O’Neil notes, are common in the payday loan industry.

Analysis: Chapters 3–4

These two chapters look at different aspects of the education industry. Although her emphasis is on the harm done to the most vulnerable, O’Neil shows how all socioeconomic sectors are hurt by current ranking and recruitment practices. Wealthy and middle-class students spend considerable time and money in the “arms race” that gives its name to Chapter 3, trying to crack the code that will make them appealing to schools. Less well-off students, even academically gifted ones, may be unable to compete on these terms. Later in life, as O’Neil shows in Chapter 4, lower-income individuals become targets for the recruiting efforts of for-profit colleges. They are often desperate for change yet frequently lack the information to decide whether a degree from such an institution is worthwhile.

Proxies, discussed throughout the book, come into sharp focus in these chapters. A key thread of O’Neil’s argument is that WMDs (“Weapons of Math Destruction”) rely on indirect data that are sometimes of dubious relevance to the thing being measured. For instance, the relative quality of a university is hard to quantify: there is no single number or statistic that naturally ranks colleges. Instead, raters treat figures like alumni donations and job placement as proxies for success. However, higher alumni donations do not necessarily mean that the alumni appreciated their education more or got more economic value out of it; they may simply have access to family wealth that gives them a head start in business or a profession. Similar proxies will appear in subsequent chapters; often, as O’Neil points out, attributes associated with income become proxies for risk or trustworthiness.