|
|
|
The views expressed on this page are
solely
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
|
Students walk on university campus quadiStock
Washington Monthly
Introduction: A Different Kind of College Ranking
Students are looking to hold schools accountable for doing good. We’ve got the metrics they need.
by Paul Glastris and Grace Gedye
It’s safe to say that the current generation of college students is
getting an education unlike any other in American history. They spent
the spring and summer in pandemic-induced disruption, isolation, and
stress, with vanished jobs and internships, taking hastily arranged
online classes, and, in most cases, paying the same tuition that they
would have if they had been on campus.
Now, as students are beginning their fall semester, the virus is still
not under control. Most have been offered the option of continuing to
take online classes while being urged, and in some cases all but
forced, to move back on campus and attend in-person classes by colleges
that need the dorm revenue—a vast socio-epidemiological experiment that
will likely be abandoned amid sickness and unnecessary death. Those
attending poorly resourced state schools—disproportionately minority
and low-income students—probably aren’t even getting the benefit of the
weekly or daily virus testing that elite private schools are providing.
Current college students have also gotten a real-world education in the
power of political activism. This summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s
killing, large numbers of them took to the streets in support of Black
Lives Matter. In November, these same students will have a chance to
vote in a national election, many for the first time. It will, to say
the least, be no ordinary election—especially for young people, who, by
definition, will have to live with the consequences longer than older
Americans.
These searing generational experiences are likely to have long-term
consequences none of us can predict. But it is a good bet that in the
short term they will lead today’s college students to demand
fundamental change from the institutions they experience most directly:
the colleges and universities they attend.
What might they demand? Well, for starters, they are going to want to
see schools make a greater effort to do right by students who are
Black, Latino, and Native American, or who come from low-income
backgrounds. They are going to want to see colleges double down on
their efforts to produce the research and technologies that will create
the new high-paying jobs they will need to sustain themselves, as well
as the solutions to climate change and other existential threats. And
they are going to want their institutions not just to tolerate their
civic activism but to sincerely encourage it.
What today’s students could use is a reliable tool to gauge how well
their colleges measure up on these demands. As it happens, there is
one. The Washington Monthly’s annual college guide ranks individual
schools based on how well they promote upward mobility, research, and
civic engagement. These criteria are quite different from those
employed by U.S. News & World Report, which ranks schools based on
their wealth, exclusivity, and prestige. The resulting lists of best
colleges are, naturally, quite different too, and those differences
reveal a great deal about what is right and wrong with the American
higher education system.
The first thing to note about our top 20 national universities is that
11 of them are state schools. By contrast, in the U.S. News rankings,
19 of the top 20 national universities are elite private ones. The
public universities on our list range from prestigious flagships like
UCLA—the only public university in U.S. News’s top 20—to institutions
that don’t even crack U.S. News’s top 50—including the University of
Washington, Texas A&M, and Utah State University. In fact, Utah
State, number 10 on our list, ranks number 254 on U.S. News’s.
You might also notice that a number of the elite private national
universities that score in U.S. News’s top 20 do less well on
ours—including Northwestern (number 30 on our list), Brown (37), and
Johns Hopkins (54). There are differences, too, in the liberal arts
category. Berea College, ranked third on our list, is 46th on U.S.
News’s. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, number 29 on our list, is
number 92 on theirs.
There’s a simple explanation for these divergences: The two magazines
are, in many ways, not measuring the same things. U.S. News relies on
such metrics as student SAT/ACT scores, alumni donations, and the
results of a survey it conducts of academics and administrators, asking
them to gauge the reputations of their peer institutions. These aren’t
bad measures if you’re an upper-income family trying to get your kid
into a fancy school. None of this data, however, factors into the
Washington Monthly’s rankings, because we don’t think it’s relevant to
the question we’re asking, which is this: Which colleges deliver the
best results for taxpayers—who invest more than $150 billion annually
in student financial aid—and for typical students, especially those who
are minorities, the first in their family to attend college, or of
modest means?
Instead, the Washington Monthly’s rankings are based on data U.S. News
incorporates barely or not at all. These include the net price a school
charges lower-income families (part of our social mobility category),
how many of its students go on to get PhDs (part of our research
category), and the degree to which it encourages its students to vote
(part of our service category).
The most noteworthy overlap between our lists and U.S. News’s is at the
tippy top—the Stanfords, Harvards, and Yales of the country. These
universities are not only prestigious and selective. They also provide
generous financial aid to the lower-income students they admit. The
operative phrase, however, is “lower-income students they
admit”—because they don’t admit many. For purposes of comparison,
consider the University of Florida, ranked 15th on the Monthly’s
rankings. Last year UF graduated more low-income students receiving
Pell Grants than did Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Duke
combined. (It is also the seventh-biggest producer of science and
engineering PhDs in the country and gets a near-perfect score for its
support of student voting.) And it manages this extraordinary feat
without the kind of huge endowments that the Ivy League schools use to
fund their student aid packages—endowments larger than the GDP of many
countries. So while the elite schools deserve kudos for generosity
toward their lower-income students, their model of financing—graduate
students who go on to insanely lucrative careers in investment banking
and then kick back a portion of their outsized gains to the
university—isn’t exactly admirable, or remotely replicable.
This gets at a larger point: The system in which colleges are forced to
operate—and that the U.S. News rankings both reflect and enable—is
rigged in favor of the wealthy and well connected, and that system has
to change, for the good of the country.
You can see this most clearly in the fate of many small, private
nonprofit schools that aren’t havens for wealthy students. Hiram
College of Ohio, for instance, has a proud history—President James
Garfield was an alum—and performs well on our rankings. It ranks third
on our bachelor’s colleges list, in part for enrolling large numbers of
first-generation college students and sending them off to PhD programs
and the Peace Corps. But Hiram has also struggled financially. In 2014,
deep in debt, it dropped several majors, including art history, and
added more in-demand ones, like sports medicine. It also recently cut
its tuition in an effort to attract more students. While these tough
but necessary moves helped, the pandemic again throws its future into
question.
Another worthy but financially stressed institution is Canisius
College, a private Jesuit school in Buffalo, New York. Canisius ranks
in the top fifth of our list of master’s universities because its
graduation rate is far higher than student demographics would predict,
and its students go on to get PhDs at high rates. But COVID-19 has
forced the college, which was already struggling, to announce layoffs
and eliminate several majors.
The pandemic may be hastening what some have long predicted: the
eventual demise of many private nonprofit colleges. The vulnerable ones
are those that serve ordinary rather than elite students. Open-access
public colleges and universities are also at risk, not of extinction so
much as of being further hollowed out by cuts to their funding from
state governments whose tax revenues are plummeting.
An influx of federal money may stave off immediate disaster. But it
won’t slow the overall trend of a higher education system in which
schools that attract the well-off grow richer while those that serve
everyone else grow poorer—forcing non-affluent students to pay
ever-higher tuition, take on ever-growing amounts of debt, and mortgage
their futures.
What America needs is a New Deal for higher education—one that will
reverse this trend while maintaining the institutional diversity and
autonomy that has long made this country’s higher education system the
envy of the world. In this issue, the longtime Washington Monthly
writer and guest editor Kevin Carey proposes such a plan . We think
it’s brilliant and pragmatic, and we hope you will, too.
Change can’t come quickly enough, especially for students of color, who
are hurt the most by the inequities baked into the current system. We
know, for instance, that Black students disproportionately attend
under-resourced community and four-year colleges; have to take on
higher levels of debt than white students to pay for it, on average;
graduate at far lower rates; and, even when they do graduate, earn less
in the workforce.
What we don’t know is how individual colleges contribute, for better or
worse, to these outcomes. That’s because little of the federal data
that researchers—and this magazine—use to assess college performance is
broken down by race. Until that changes, imperfect workarounds are the
best we can do. We gave it a shot in this issue by tapping a new data
set from the U.S. Department of Education to create a first-ever list
of colleges where majors popular with Black students lead to
decent-paying jobs.
Elsewhere in this issue, Daniel Block examines some new thinking among
Black academics about how to help more students of color enter and
succeed in STEM fields. Jamaal Abdul-Alim looks at a program that was
wildly successful at boosting completion rates at two-year schools, and
why policymakers let it wither away. And Anne Kim reports on a
technical training program that employers are actually willing to pay
for—one that focuses on soft skills.
Since we began publishing our annual college rankings in 2005, we’ve
been warning that America’s higher education system is an inequitable,
unsustainable mess that rips off too many of the students it is meant
to help. Now, with that system teetering on the brink, we may be at an
opportune moment to fundamentally change it. And the current generation
of students, the most screwed yet, may be the ones to push us to
finally act.
Get the list of College rankings at Washington Monthly
|
|
|
|
