The Halls of Superior Learning
The Washington Monthly released its 2010 national university rankings and coming in at #4 is Stanford, the top private university upstaging all of her east coast counterparts. All the Ivies lag behind with Harvard ranked 9th, Princeton 24th, and Yale, a ways down there, at 33. (If you were choosing to matriculate between HYPS, you made the right choice if you picked the Card!) What is surprising though is that 13 out of the top 20 universities are public, quite a contrast from the popular U.S. News and World Report college rankings where in the 2011 ranking all 20 of its top universities are private, and where the Ivy League schools are notably favored. (Stanford has moved down a spot from it’s place at #4 in the 2010 ranking to #5 to Columbia, another Ivy, go figure.)
In the Washington Monthly ranking, the universities that came out in front of Stanford were UC-San Diego at #1, followed by UC-Berkeley (are you kidding me?), and then UCLA. Now in what alternate reality do three other California universities end up ahead of Stanford and all her counterparts on the lesser coast as well? It happened in this one, folks…
Washington Monthly uses an extremely interesting array of criterion to generate their ranking. Instead of taking a look at factors such as academic reputation, acceptance rates, or matriculation rates (all of which noted Stanford Economics Professor Caroline Hoxby wrote are ranking factors that establish an artificially perceived sense of school desirability), Washington Monthly’s ranking methodology is based on a schools contribution to the public good in three broad categories:
1. Social Mobility: recruiting and graduating low-income students
2. Research: producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs
3. Service: encouraging students to give something back to their country
They break down how they rank each section and display data, such as how many students receive a Pell Grant in the Social Mobility category, research expenditures and faculty receiving significant awards in the Research category, and a universities’ Peace Corp participation, hours of community service logged, and federal work study spent on service in the Service category. They also take their rankings a step further and allow you to sort the overall rankings based on which school has the highest rank in each individual category.
Whereas U.S. New and World Report’s ranking methodology is comprised of undergraduate academic reputation (because judging a book by its cover will really give us accurate assessments), graduation and freshman retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, and a newly added “high school counselor consultation” among others. (You can find the full break down of their ranking methodology here.) Taking a look at their formula, it’s clear as to why USNWR’s ranking favors the Ivies and other highly selective institutions. Harvard’s endowment alone could probably boost it up a spot or two in these rankings.
But finally we have a college rankings system that judges the societal impact a university has as opposed to how well received it’s namesake is. It certainly is intriguing to see that when it comes to a ranking system that is measuring societal contributions, the majority of top schools are public. Admittedly, they are still well-known universities (UT-Austin, UC-Davis, UMichigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-Santa Barbara, and South Carolina State round up the top 15). Stanford is the exception though ranking highly when it comes to measurements on both societal contributions and on academic repute (of course!).
I would think that judging a universities’ contributions to the public are a better indication of which institutions are best shaping individuals who will be motivated to contribute to society. Yet, there is a reason that certain universities have the prestigious reputations that they do. Nevertheless, all these college rankings are prone to becoming subjective and are an artificial assessment of the true value of an institution. College rankings, no matter which source they’re conducted by, are only capable of measuring certain facets of an institution and given the limitations it is impossible to truly assess how valuable an institution intrinsically is. As always it will be up to individual students, what one makes of his or her opportunities at any given university, and how they allow their experiences there to shape them that will make a university truly valuable. College rankings will never be able to measure the beauty of those experiences or the affinity that a school has in offering them.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
But we still lost to Berkeley…
It ain’t worth winning if you can’t WIN BIG
Clearly the criteria they’re using is a joke. That’s not how to judge the quality of a university.
Well, there are at least two distinct ways to judge universities:
(i) The employer’s perspective: how qualified are the graduates?
(ii) The taxpayer or donor’s perspective: how much value is the university adding to society per dollar spent? Different people have different utility functions w.r.t. “adding value to society”, of course, but a relatively ideologically homogeneous group like the set of Washington Monthly subscribers might be able to work with a single ranking.
Traditional rankings, with their emphasis on academic reputation and absolute measures of student/alumni performance, primarily caters to (i).
The Washington Monthly attempts to cater to (ii). It does a pretty awful job–among other things, it makes elementary mistakes like not scaling research expenditures by some measure of university size, and this failure artificially boosts the major public universities–but the basic concept is legitimate. Even though, if I were an incoming student, I would care more about (i) (it’s not my dollars being spent, but it is my career that will be affected).
Ms. Wang:
Just say it like it is: college rankings suck.
The attempt to decide whether, in 2010, Stanford beats out Princeton, or whether Yale should trump Columbia is a fools errand. The only thing that quantitatively varies from year to year at a university is the number of freshman girls doing unmentionables with upperclass boys.
I don’t like your college ranking talk because, although it nicely highlights an alternative measure of a university’s worth, it is using the same competitive logic the east coast kids like to use when they want to feel like the same bud-light they drink comes out rosewater. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Northwestern, Southwestern, Eastwestern… who CARES?!
I would like to think our wonderful university (yes, I too speak from the hallowed archways of Leland Stanford Junior Universtah) feels comfortable simply because it knows its own excellence. Like those freshman girls, I think institutions of higher learning would serve themselves and each other better if they just had a little more self-confidence! Tell the US News to bark up another tree for its “peer assessment rankings.” Stuff ‘em!
I too get a slight erection from seeing Stanford being highly ranked by Mortimer Zuckerman’s minions, but its a quality I certainly don’t admire about myself.
“…As always it will be up to individual students, what one makes of his or her opportunities at any given university, and how they allow their experiences there to shape them that will make a university truly valuable…”
See… thats just not the case. But it WOULD be if there were no rankings! People use rankings to create ideas about institutions that are simply not true. Imagine if Daddy couldn’t tell poor Anna-Elizabeth, accepted to every top school, that she cannot go to Stanford over Harvard because it isn’t ranked #1 (you know it happens).
I imagine teenagers everywhere picking schools for their individual merits, and I imagine less of a bull$^!t, tearful rat race for every high school kid in America.
This can only start if we stop groveling for the approval of others.
Hail Stanford Hail!
Daniel
@Chris Chang: Well that is the thing isn’t it, that while Washington Monthly is making a valiant attempt to “thwart the tyranny of prestige” as one of their employees dubbed it, the majority of people would, like you, care more about (i) because they are either students or potential students who are thinking how to best increase their chances of getting on the career path or entering the grad school that they want upon graduation.
How many students are going to decide to reject an academically reputable school that betters their post graduation opportunities on the basis that there are other schools that have contributed more to society but may not be as reputable? Under that lens, I would say none. Sure, the societal contributions ranking may have a little influence on a perspective student that cares about the public good, but that alone won’t by any stretch of the imagination have enough sway to make Sallie choose UCSD over Yale. (What would make her choose UCSD over Yale though would be if it were an overall better fit for her based of her individual wants in a higher learning institution.)
On questions of the legitimacy of the rankings (you raise a good point on the faults of WM’s ranking methodology), I think the ranking entities already start with their necks up to the water because they’re attempting to offer a methodological solution to an area that is by nature highly subjective. They’re doomed to a floodgate of criticism.
As I said in my post, for an individual to truly gauge the value of an institution they’d have to evaluate the experiences that they’ve personally had there, and it’s impossible for a ranking system to capture that.
@Daniel: I wouldn’t necessarily say college rankings suck, but that they should be taken with a grain of salt. I think the problem from college rankings arises if you choose to attend the school that has the highest spot on U.S. News over what you personally feel is the best fit.
I think the competitive logic is in itself not a bad trait (as it pushes you to push yourself), but when you allow it to give you an elitist superiority complex it quickly becomes unattractive. I hope no one ever takes themselves too seriously especially when it comes to college rankings.
“I imagine teenagers everywhere picking schools for their individual merits, and I imagine less of a bull$^!t, tearful rat race for every high school kid in America.”
When choosing a college or university, I feel that the the assessment of individual merits that you’re calling for can’t be much different from the merits that are being judged in the status quo (though I do understand your sentiment of wishing it were less of a rat race- students seriously let it consume them). At a basic level individual merits that pertain to academics aren’t too varied when you do side by side comparisons of similar schools.
The merits that do differentiate schools revolve mostly around shaping that school’s identity- what values the institution emphasizes, the kind of students it attracts, the level of school pride and spirit there is, etc.
While the academic merits played a factor in the schools you applied to, at the end of the day if you’re being true to yourself you pick the school that fits you best based off of the identity that that school has created for itself. That is the decision that will most likely allow you to both succeed AND be happy. Sure, there are plenty of people that may just pick Harvard “because they can’t say no” (to the prestige), but I think more students do choose which institution their gut tells them to go with.
And alas, those poor freshmen girls. Maybe the solution would be to limit their attendance to frat parties…but then our nightlife rating on College Prowler would decline…ah the system is unescapable!
Washington monthly ranking is funny. They waste time and money to mess up the ranking system. They regard the education institutions as charity organizations or others. No matter what, I don’t think that parents and students like to select Syracuse instead of Harvard.
US News ranking is serious and trustable. Shanghai Jiaotong University ranking, too. Forbes ranking also seems strange. It ranked WEst point, a military training camp, as #1 ever. The point is to make things you compare comparable. You cannot compare camels with ants for food consumption.
“Business of America is business”. I guess that college rankings are more commercial nowadays like US presidential election. Groups are crazy to make something different.
Different rankings are developed because one size doesn’t fit all. USN&WR clearly penalizes large and public institutions, just at this new “methodology” penalizes small and private institutions. Each “methodology” (in quotes for obvious reasons) is grinding some sort of axe in an attempt to be controversial and to grab “ink” for the respective publisher.
Here is an amusing trait of several of the underlying methodologies: a predicted academic success rate or graduation rate is calculated; this calculated rate is compared to the actual rate for graduation. If a university falls short, it receives a reduction of its “score”. So, in effect, if the model is a crummy model, the school is penalized for the forecast error. In other words, the model may or may not be properly constructed and may or may not have statistical validity but the bottom line is a given school’s score is reduced by that error. Does that make sense or is that moronic? You decide.