The first axiom of data analysis is: “No data have meaning apart from their context.” Yet we all encounter measures that have been dreamed up without regard for either context or use. This column gives a couple of the more egregious examples I have encountered over the years.

Kentucky Higher Education Commission

The first example is a formula used by the Kentucky Higher Education Commission in the 1970s to allocate state funds to the various state-run colleges and universities. A former student of mine sent this formula along with the relevant data for all of the post-secondary state schools. This funding equation had five terms that had to be evaluated for each school. The first four terms were relatively complex terms involving various variables to characterize the school, while the last term was the simple ratio of the school’s full-time equivalent head count to the total full-time equivalent head count for the state as a whole.

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