If it’s back to school, it must be time for the publication of college rankings. In recent days, U.S. News & World Report released its much-discussed rankings of U.S. colleges and universities, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University declared its ranking of world universities. As my Innovations Blog colleague Richard Vedder noted recently, Forbes has its own rankings to compete with U.S. News, and Vedder (who helped Forbes come up with its methodology) argues that Forbes’s is better—that is, ranks higher.

My good friend Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at U.S. News, discusses the proliferation of rankings in his fascinating new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World. Wildavsky devotes a lengthy chapter to global rankings and compares and contrasts the two main international rankings—the Shanghai rankings, which look primarily at science research ...

This morning’s Washington Post features a major story about a brewing battle between conservative television host Glenn Beck and civil rights activist Al Sharpton over the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.  Both men plan to hold rallies in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 2010, the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington, during which King delivered his celebrated “I Have A Dream” speech.  The question, as the Post’s headline suggests, is: “Who Owns August 28?”

Beck, who has enraged many with his comment that President Barack Obama harbors “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” claims that “divine providence” led him to choose August 28 as a day to hold a “Restoring Honor” rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  He declared, “Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln.  Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.”  And he called for a ...

President Obama’s recent speech at the University of Texas at Austin stressed the need to boost college graduate rates. One aspect of the challenge is making sure that low-income students feel comfortable and are successful on campuses that are often dominated by students from wealthy backgrounds. At Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill innovative programs have been put in place that could serve as models for higher education across the country.

According to a recent article by Kristen Hare in the St. Louis Beacon, two students at Wash U have started a new organization, United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity, or “U/FUSED.” Chapters have since spread to St. Louis University and Duke. The founders, Fernando Cutz and Chase Sackett, were scholarship students who recently graduated and felt that the issue of socioeconomic diversity...

Next Tuesday, August 3rd, when many folks in higher education may still be winding up vacations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will hear oral arguments in the most important affirmative-action case since the 2003 Supreme Court decision supporting the policy at the University of Michigan Law School in Grutter v. Bollinger.

The challenge to the use of race in admissions at the University of Texas at Austin sharpens the focus on a question left hanging in Grutter: How vigorously do universities need to pursue race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action before resorting to racial preferences in admissions?  As an excellent article by Morgan Smith in the Texas Tribune last week notes, the fact that UT Austin was banned from using race by an earlier Fifth Circuit decision in Hopwood v. Texas (1996) provides a unique set of circumstances to test whether race-neutral...

Ross Douthat’s column in yesterday’s New York Times suggested that in building a diverse class, elite universities and colleges should make room for more white working-class conservatives from rural areas and Red States. For more than a decade, I’ve pushed for greater socioeconomic diversity on college campuses so one of my daughters understandably called me to celebrate the Douthat piece.

 
In fact, however, I think Douthat’s rationale is all wrong. Yes, we should have more working-class kids at selective colleges and universities, but not just to make the conversations more interesting and to build a future elite that understands working-class whites. More fundamentally, we should want more poor and working-class kids at selective institutions because a fair meritocracy requires consideration of economic disadvantage—a point surprisingly missing in Douthat’s analysis.

Douthat starts by ...

The latest news involving the University of California—“Berkeley Sees Admission of Latino Students Drop and Nonresidents Jump”—pits two groups, Hispanic students and non-Californians. But of course what’s really going on is a struggle over money, economic class, and the question of how dedicated public universities will be to their special mission of promoting social mobility.  

U.C. Berkeley is cash starved, and one way to raise money is to bring in more wealthy out-of-state students, who pay $22,000 more in fees than resident students. Berkeley didn’t make its change slowly—it more than doubled the proportion of out-of-state students in the freshman class in a single year, from 11% to 23%. And it did so with the full awareness that minority students would suffer. The drop in Latino admissions was 12%. (The data published by the U.C. system addressed changes in racial and ethnic...

Last week, The New York Times featured a front page story on an emerging battle over admissions to France’s elite universities. The article, “Top French Schools, Asked to Diversify, Fear for Standards,” is on one level deeply reminiscent of the battles over affirmative action in the United States, but it also contained interesting twists that may offer lessons to American educators.

Familiar to American readers was the choice between meritocracy, as measured by test scores and the need to diversify the “overwhelmingly white”student population at the “grandes ecoles,” France’s most selective 220 schools. In February, Times reporter Steven Erlanger noted, the Conference des Grandes Ecoles adopted a controversial “Charter for Equal Opportunity,” in which schools committed to having 30% of the student bodies consist of low-income scholarship students by 2012, up from less than 10% today....

On Thursday, at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington D.C., the Century Foundation released a new book that I edited entitled Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College. The discussion, which featured chapter authors Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University and former New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske—along with William  Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard College—raised a number of key issues in the fight for expanding access to low-income students.  Related controversies were raised by media reports about the book in places like USA Today, Inside Higher Education, and National Review.

Rewarding Strivers is a follow on to the Century Foundation’s 2004 volume, America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education, which included a chapter by Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose finding that at selective institutions, 74% of...

In a recent article in The Chronicle Review, I outlined some forthcoming research which suggests that affirmative action programs should be primarily about addressing socioeconomic disadvantage rather than race.  The researchers, Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl of Georgetown University, find that there is a 399 point predicted difference in the combined math and verbal SAT scores between the most socioeconomically advantaged students and the least advantaged but only a 56 point difference based on race (being black rather than white.)  These data raise questions about current university practices, which provide large preferences to under-represented minorities, but virtually no consideration of economic disadvantage.  I noted that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon significantly cut back on affirmative action by race, effectively driving universities to a greater consideration of economic...

For years, educators at the K-12 level have worried about white and wealthy flight from cities to suburbs and the effect this development has on the education of low-income and minority students left behind. But is something similar happening in higher education? New evidence suggests the answer is yes, though you wouldn't know it from mainstream discussions.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics released its annual Condition of Education report, which had some bad news on the equity front for elementary and secondary schools but seemed to have some good news for higher education. 

The report found that poor and minority students are increasingly concentrated in high poverty elementary and secondary schools. Between the 1999-2000 and 2007-08 school years the proportion of students who attended high poverty schools increased from 12% to 1...