Claremont McKenna College removed from magazine ranking

Claremont McKenna College took another blow Friday as a result of the scandal involving its admissions office exaggerating freshman classes’ SAT scores. Kiplinger, the finance magazine, announced that it had dropped the Southern California campus from its list of best values in liberal arts colleges.

“Kiplinger’s has learned that Claremont McKenna College unfairly earned its place as 18th-ranked private liberal arts college in our college rankings by reporting inflated SAT scores,” the magazine announced in an online statement.

With the elimination of Claremont McKenna, all the schools listed below it moved up one rank, the publication said. Pomona College, a sister school in the Claremont cluster of seven undergraduate and graduate institutions, remains number one on that Kiplinger list.

Claremont McKenna spokesman Max Benavidez said Friday that the school had no comment about the Kiplinger move. However, he noted that the college has sent out corrected scores to magazines and federal agencies that had received the exaggerated statistics.

Earlier this week, Claremont McKenna president Pamela B. Gann informed the school that an admissions official had boosted the collective freshman SAT scores for the past six years, manipulating statistics that are a factor in national rankings of schools by publications such as U.S. News & World Report. Gann said that the person responsible for the hyped numbers resigned from the college but she did not identify the official. However, the college confirmed that Richard Vos, long-time admissions dean, is no longer working at the school.

In U.S. News & World Report’s recent ranking of national liberal arts colleges, Claremont McKenna was ninth, up from 11th the year before. In a statement, U.S. News said it would not revise previously published rankings but that it will review the corrected test scores and estimate the impact on Claremont McKenna’s rankings.

larry.gordon@latimes.com