[pmyteh]

Leaving aside the suggestions of fraud, this is also a good demonstration of Goodhart's Law: "A measure that becomes a target becomes a bad measure".

There are good reasons to believe that, for example, selectivity of admissions or graduation rates are some kind of quality signal. But as soon as it becomes strategically important to 'score well' on those metrics it becomes well worth universities doing things that will improve the metric without improving the quality - such as rejecting qualified applicants or graduating those who ought to have failed. And now the quality signal is much less useful if you're simply trying to use it to understand what's going on.