Orion's Eyes

Saturday August 19, 2006

The Washington Monthly College Rankings

The Washington Monthly, which says it is "an independent voice, ... willing to take on sacred cows--liberal and conservative," has just come out with their second annual ranking of U.S. colleges. Rather than complain about the U.S. News & World Report rankings, they decided last year to produce a college guide of their own.

Instead of comparing schools on academic excellence, they developed a ratings scale based on how much a school is benefiting the country, and came up with three criteria:

1. how well it performs as an engine of social mobility,
2. how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and
3. how well it promotes an ethic of service to country.

They then devised ways to measure and quantify these criteria and set up two rankings: one for national universities and another for liberal arts colleges.

So how well does NC State do if one changes the criteria in this manner? While NCSU was ranked 81st of U.S. universities by U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Monthly ranks us 115. Our neighbors to the west ranked:

23      Duke University      (US News: 8)
32      University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill      (US News: 27)
55      Wake Forest University      (US News: 30)

So sadly the Washington Monthly's new way of counting doesn't mean that NC State fares any better. Actually, we do quite a bit worse by dropping 34 places. I guess this is one statistic that won't be touted by the university.

An interesting part of the Washington Monthly's report is an article called "Is Our Students Learning?" by Kevin Carey. He laments the impossibility of using any of the published rankings to objectively measure the performance of colleges and universities, and goes on to describe three measures that do. These are The Collegiate Learning Assessment, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and measuring what happens to students after they graduate (like Florida's annual State University System Accountability Reports). In each case he describes a reluctance by the academic community to make this kind of information available to the public.

It is sad that the resources for choosing one of the major investments that a family has to make in life are so lacking in concrete measures. One would think that scholarly institutions like colleges and universities could, and would want to, measure themselves with scientific rigor and publish the results.
Posted by orion Aug 19 2006, 07:00:30 AM EDT Permalink Comments [0]