The College Rankings Racket

From the article: "Yes, The Washington Monthly’s rankings are yet another list compiled by magazine editors, inevitably flawed. But the point the magazine is trying to make is that this is the model of higher education we should be encouraging. Can you really disagree? I have no doubt that you can obtain a very good education at Texas A&M. As you surely can at many other institutions that don’t crack the top of the U.S. News rankings."

I happen to like the Washington Monthly rankings and the assumptions behind them quite well. When I think about colleges for my four children, I consider a variety of sources, and don't give a privileged bit of mindshare to the always controversial U. S. News rankings. A really useful tool for college applicants themselves, or for parents who will be asked to pay part of their children's expenses for higher education, is the College Results website

http://www.collegeresults.org/

which is a user-friendly interface for searching up data reported by all United States colleges and universities to the federal IPEDS database. If you look up Harvard and then ask to see similar colleges

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=16...

there, and compare that with looking up Texas A & M and comparing similar colleges,

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=22...

you are given a whole bunch of sortable data columns, grouped under different tabs, by which you can compare colleges. I especially like to use the Finance and Faculty tab and then to sort by Instructional Expenditures / Total FTE to see the stark differences among colleges in how much they actually spend on student instruction. In a few rare cases, the spending per student is ABOVE full list price for all students enrolled at the university (because the university has endowment funds and other sources of revenue besides tuition payments from students). In a dismayingly large number of cases, even after "merit aid" (bounties offered to desirable students) and other "scholarships" (discounts from list price offered to price-sensitive applicants) the net out-of-pocket price for a student and the student's family is still ABOVE the actual spending of the university on student instruction. It's worth looking at this kind of comparison when comparing actual financial aid offers from universities after being admitted to more than one.

Of course the radical thing that U. S. News and World Report began doing a few years after I finished my undergraduate degree was RANKING rather than just publishing ratings. By forcing all "national universities," on the one hand, and all "national liberal arts colleges," on the other hand, into a single strictly ordered ranked list, it set up a fratricide among colleges that has students wondering, "Why shouldn't I go to that higher-ranked college if I get admitted to more than one college?" A lot of colleges used to survive on strictly local reputations in the olden days, but now most colleges are part of a national market of applicants, and have to step up to national reputations. This is not wholly desirable for the colleges or for the applicants, and shouldn't be the last word on anyone's college choices, but it has reduced the isolation in which many colleges used to form their reputations in my generation.

Of course in September 2007 Paul Graham wrote an essay, "News from the Front,"

http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html

in which he wrote, "A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college."

A lot of people still think that is a radical idea. They still think it is crucially important to go to a better rather than a worse college, and certainly important to go to college rather than to enter the workforce before gaining a college degree. Maybe, maybe not. It is undeniably important to learn how to be curious as an adult and how to learn new knowledge each year for all of one's life, and if college helps with that process, that's wonderful. But the learner attitude of taking responsibility for learning throughout life is more important than the degree, don't you think?