College Rankings

This year’s Washington Monthly college rankings are out, and it appears that once again I’ve helped thwart my university’s ascent into the top 258 schools, at least if we list them in order of the public good they provide. My undergraduate alma mater, James Madison University, also fails to make the list, while the University of Minnesota — which was probably able to write off the cost of my 2001 Ph.D. as some sort of charitable gift — lands at #50. Make of that what you will.

Paul Glastris’ editorial — explaining the rationale and broader context for the rankings — is well worth reading. He makes the point, for example, that the market distortions in higher education are a result of schools’ unwillingness to make public data that might prove unflattering; lacking accurate information regarding how well colleges and universities do what they claim to do, applicants are less able to compare and judge the value of different schools. Unfortunately, as I complained in a previous blog life, most universities acknowledge that problem to one degree or another but have elected to solve obfuscate it by encouraging a “culture of assessment” that develops new quantitative and qualitate methods for judging student performance.

So while Glastris is right to note that “[i]f we can decode the human genome and figure out what happened in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang, we can arrive at some reasonably accurate estimate of how much various groups of students learn over two or four years,” that process is, for the time being, dependent upon (a) faculty who generally lack the training, time, and compensation structure to develop useful, portable measures for evaluating learning; and (b) university administrators who I’d suspect are no less eager to spin and cook the new data (for legislatures, trustees, accrediting agencies, etc.) than they ordinarily would be. For anything like what Glastris has in mind to actually work, schools are going to have to invest a lot of money, not just to develop systems for measuring learning, but also for staff who are actually good at sorting and analyzing the data those systems provide. Are schools actually willing to pay for that sort of thing? I’d like to think so, but I have my doubts.