Video Wednesday

Bravo. I have watched with dismay as my own alma mater (which shall remain nameless, but it is a well-respected university) has announced its own intentions to attract more applications over the years. Not because it wants to increase enrollment, or even because it wants to raise the entering statistics of its classes (which are already nearly at the very top) – but because REJECTING more people qualifies one as “more selective” and raises its status in the rankings.

I think this is beyond ridiculous. There is something immoral about saying, “Instead of rejecting 10,000 applicants, we want to reject 20,000.”

It is worth noting that the pursuit of some distorted definition of “selectivity” has also gone hand in hand with skyrocketing tuition. And, as colleges and universities have become more selective and more expensive, they have also begun to demand more and more absurd qualifications from high school students applying for admission: have you built a home for Habitat for Humanity? Gone to Guatemala with Doctors Without Borders? Sequenced the rat genome? Won a Nobel Peace Prize?

What ever happened to admitting a kid who had good grades, played in the school band, and stayed out of trouble? And graduating them four years later WITH a solid education, but WITHOUT saddling them with a mortgage?

We are way, way off base here. I have said this before – in these pages, and elsewhere: what we are seeing in higher ed is a BUBBLE. The prices are inflated, the value is overstated, and it must all come down. And hopefully, when it does, we will return to some semblance of normalcy.

Bravo, Sandy and Michael! Your astute comments once again expose the profound bias in the U.S. News view of higher education. The entire rankings scheme is based on wealth — the wealth of students and families, who, in turn, enrich the most elite institutions. The closed-circle effect is obvious.

Meanwhile, those of us whose labors in higher education focus on access and success for some of the most marginalized populations in the nation inhabit a vastly different universe from the idyllic campuses of U.S. News lore and ratings criteria. There’s no measure in the U.S. News world for the success of colleges who educate large numbers of students who are already self-supporting at age 18, who may already be parents or expecting, who have fled oppressive regimes in Africa or suffered the cruel failures of urban K-12 schools.

There is little recognition of the plain fact that the traditional timeline for collegiate completion — four years — rests on a largely outmoded assumption that the “kids” can go to college while the parents foot the bill. Gidget doesn’t go to college any more. The vast majority of undergraduates today (almost 75% by U.S. Department of Education statistics) are “non-traditional” by the measures of working status, parenting, part-time attendance, self-supporting, age or other criteria that are part of the real life of the majority of students on college campuses today.

U.S. News’s work would be simply entertainment for a small part of the higher education sector were it not so damaging for the majority of students who truly profit from and succeed in the hundreds of colleges and universities that don’t measure up on the U.S. News wealth/tradition scale.

(from Pat McGuire, president, Trinity Washington University)

This is the dumbest ranking of all because all it measures is whether it is a private college rather than a state school, and if it is a public college whether it is a residential university rather than a commuter, metropolitan school. But those simply are an alternative way of measuring family income and wealth! Graduation rate should not be included in the U.S. news rankings at all because it jumbles together good and bad (at least until they attempt to control for income differences and part-time non-trads or transfer students).

High grad rate is good if it primarily proxies for terrific advising, open courses, motivated students, high acceptance of AP/IB course credits, few administrative and curricular hurdles erected to generate FTEs and extra tuition. However, high rates measure how bad a college is when it represents grade inflation, low standards, lack of rigor, a weak salad-bar set of “core” requirements, or tuition and fees so high that students are pressured to graduate as soon as possible rather than explore to reach their potential.

Excellent analysis, as usual. This is a great counterpoint to the ridiculous arguments made by people like Rich Vedder (such as in this post, http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/chicago-state-u-costs-more-than-northwestern/28767), which uses graduation rates as critical measures of colleges’ success. Take all of those students at Williams, and swap them with the students at Chicago State, and guess what would happen to the respective graduation rates of the two institutions?

Good article.

Thanks for pointing out a few of the many lines of elitist and just plain bad reasoning on the relationship between admissions criteria, grades, achievement, and graduation, which extend also to debt load and loan default.

Many who post frequently in CHE believe that the solution to higher education’s ills is to admit only the best and the brightest, leaving the others to . . . well, they don’t specify. We can see why some kinds of personalities would advocate this. Teaching very bright, highly motivated students makes you look good . . . until you realize that it has nothing to do with you and that these students will succeed with or without you and with or without your institution. Still, it is a lot of fun to “teach” the brightest or at least be around while they use you to learn. Real teaching is in play when you convey knowledge and proficiencies, eventually graduating someone who would not otherwise have succeeded were it not for your skills.

I agree that each decision to extend the benefits of education to a wider or even a different audience is accompanied by an obligation to identify and respond to the needs of that group. In one sense, however, the increased need for remedial facilities created by a decision to educate the underclass is not logically different from the obligation to invest more in recreational and social infrastructure created by a decision to educate the elite. Good education identifies the contextual needs of the students and meets them to the extent possible.

However, I’m not sure I agree that these decisions necessarily imply higher tuition. I see other layers at which the problem can also be addressed.

- First, is resource reallocation. Are we allocating outsize levels of “contextual support” to one group (perhaps athletics) and too little to another (perhaps the socially disadvantaged)? Most institutions would probably benefit from an open-eyed assessment of its current resource allocations.

- Second, you mentioned publics so I will use them as the example. The impact of public funding is twice that of tuition. Taxpayers pay at least $16,000 per student per year (more based on most models) while students pay about $7,500. Public support is declining for several reasons. To counter this trend we need effective arguments that the benefits of public higher education exceed the costs. These arguments need to be based on facts but we don’t have facts. In their place, we offer overworked anecdotes and vague unsupportable claims. The only way to build compelling arguments about benefits is to create, gather, and analyze metrics at which we now only guess. Armed with economically sound arguments related to employment, crime, public assistance, etc. college presidents might be more effective in dealing with legislatures. Yes, some of our elected officials are ideologues who cannot be reached by facts. At the state level, however, economic facts are exactly what drives most legislative decisions, especially once the posturing is over (exceptions such as New York, New Jersey, & Illinois noted).

Taking this back to U.S. News, they make these silly claims not because they are elitist but because they are ignorant. Only good metrics will show that it takes different resources to educate different types of students and that doing so is a public good. My personal opinion is that the greatest public ROI is realized when we remove a young member of the underclass from public assistance and place him or her in a career, even if it is based on a two-year degree, and even if we all had to work harder than usual to help this person become proficient and graduate. The elite will take care of themselves and members of the vast middle-group already have resources targeted at them.

So the question is, “Why does USNWR continue to get away with what most of us have known to be a patently misrepresentative set of parameters for its institution rankings?” The answer may lie in part to the political leanings of its owners/editors. But in a larger sense, the answer is that these rankings, like the anachronism of the official measures of retention and graduation rates, are not accidental. They serve the interests of the most traditional and influential institutions whose very influence depends in part on their continuance. And the only students and parents who can afford to pay anywhere near full freight at these places are those already in positions of power. The rankings are part of a racket promoted by the elite gang to maintain and enhance their position.

So what to do? The only way to combat this sort of thing is to come up with defensible alternative forms of evaluation and then promoting them to the public in every way possible. The truth is that the large majority of college graduates did not go and will not be going to the snooty expensive joints. And prominent exceptions not withstanding, most of the people who do the mportant work in our country did not go to one of these schools. It’s time we provided the analytical and research framework within which these people can stand up and proclaim the value of their educational institutions and the educations they received and thumb their noses at the snobs. Can we help? them–and us?intellectual and

Yes, yes, and YES! This is PRECISELY what has upset me about my own home institution, which began as a vehicle for immigrants’ kids and grandkids to have a better lot in life – and boy, have they. The campus is filled with beautiful buildings named for successful graduates. But you used to be able to wait tables or drive a truck over the summer and pay half your way. Who can afford $50K+/year now? (More, at a lot of places…)

And I wonder, too – how do people do it who have more than one child?

These events – and others – are among the sources of my personal pride in having worked at a large, state institution that is much, much cheaper. I used to think they were huge and impersonal. And I know they can be. But they – and community colleges – are still places where those whose parents don’t have $250K per child, or those who cannot afford to borrow $250K – can get a decent education. That is, to paraphrase the MasterCard commercial, priceless.

The only way this will stop is when schools of note stop participating in these rankings. I am not holding my breath.

Boston Schools are very interesting to examine. Although I have a bias toward BC, US News and World Report ranks them higher. In studying the history of the institution, they’ve made a dramatic shift from where they were 20 years ago by changing the population of the student body.