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Ouch, Phi Beta Cons. Ouch.
Over over at Phi Beta Cons, George Leef doesn’t much care for our rankings:
If you think the US News rankings are silly, this will have you rolling on the floor. Why does the fact that lots of students are taking advantage of Pell Grants mean that the school is good? Ditto for the proclivity of alums to enter the Peace Corps. Those are proxies for leftist feel-good notions, but they don’t tell us anything about the schools’ educational value for students.
We’re nothing if not transparent about the reasoning behind our ranking. As we explain in the introduction to the rankings (and touch upon further in a note from our editor-in-chief and our breakdown of the categories displayed on the rankings), “we all depend on colleges and universities to produce groundbreaking research and new inventions, to serve as engines of social mobility for first-generation college students, and to mold the minds of future leaders.” We think the Pell Grant and Peace Corps numbers are telling indicators of whether colleges are living up to these tasks.
Leef can bluntly tar us for promoting “leftist feel-good notions” all he wants (although, given the fact that our rankings raise the hackles of some on the left for including a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps component, this isn’t a particularly compelling critique), but it would be more useful for him to explain exactly why he thinks Pell Grants and Peace Corps membership are bad metrics given the premises we’ve laid out.
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Tommaso on September 03, 2009 2:03 PM:
I do appreciate your ranking, it is way more useful for me to choose a school than the inane elitist ones.
On the other hand, I do think it does somewhat penalize schools like UC Santa Cruz that originally started with the mission of providing a small liberal arts institution within a large public university setting because on the emphasis on PHDs and research. Already we are seeing UCSC's greatness diminished by the administation's insistence of turning it into just another research institution, and this ranking does not help to stop this problematic trend (I see this trend as problematic because I think there is an essential role in society for schools that focus on the social sciences to provide the moral backbone for our nation and analyze often ignored social injustices and propose policy fixes).
Jason Becker on September 03, 2009 5:45 PM:
While I do appreciate your list and I love the intention behind these rankings, I do think the numbers and sources need a little tweaking.
There's no reason to include Peace Corps without including Americorps, another great measure of service.
The inclusion of ROTC is a bit peculiar to me. For starters, many top institutions kicked ROTC off their campuses during Vietnam and even where it has returned, it has returned in a whisper rather than a roar. I think that this penalizes private institutions unfairly. I'm also curious why a measure like ROTC says anything about what the college itself does to influence students. I was under the impression that most people choose to participate in ROTC before they enter college. ROTC participation says more about the kinds of students who enroll at the university rather than something the universities do-- and more than that, since colleges don't run the ROTC programs themselves, it just seems like an odd measure to choose.
I don't understand the use of "predicted" graduation rates and never have. Let's look at the actual graduation rates, and maybe better yet, let's look at graduation rates of those Pell Grant students and URMs. It's one thing to enroll students, it's another to have students complete at your institution.
Also, while Pell Grants serve as a really decent binary indicator, it's still a proxy and imprecise. Many institutions, because of their financial aid policy, enroll more Pell Grant recipients but very few middle class students. This may be used for similar reasons that free and reduced price lunch is used to measure poverty at k-12 schools-- that's the number that has to be reported and so it's the best we have universally, however, I'd like to see a more accurate indicator.
Finally, are the composite scores based upon some manipulation of the rank in each area? This is a bad idea as well-- small differences in actual numbers can result in somewhat large rank-order differences that artificially increase the space between schools.
I think this is a great way to get a very different look at colleges and universities, but there are still some small changes that seem pretty clear to me that would greatly improve the veracity of these rankings.
Texas Aggie on September 04, 2009 9:30 PM:
I was somewhat struck by your ranking TAMU fifth in the nation. It obviously had something to do with having the Corps and also beaucoup bucks for research. Might I add that one of the reasons that we have so many economically challenged students is that under Texas law, if you graduate in the top 10% of your class, the state schools have to accept you. It's a good program and it gives kids from predominantly minority schools a chance in life (so Texas isn't all that bad), but it isn't something that the state schools would do on their own. As a matter of fact, tu (that's texas university at austin to the uninitiated) is right now lobbying frantically to be exempted from that requirement.
As for his objection to Peace Corps, Mr. leef needs to get a life, maybe go out and do something different and worthwhile for a change, something that helps people. He would be surprised how much of a better person it makes him.
jharp on September 04, 2009 11:18 PM:
I was pleased to see my alma mater ranked 20th.
Anyways, I'm going to turn my daughter on to your site. She's a senior, has excellent grades, and is deaf. And is actively seeking a college.
I hope your site helps her.
Paul Camp on September 05, 2009 12:20 AM:
I do think your metrics are incomplete. You use Peace Corps and ROTC for service metrics. That's all well and good, but ROTC in particular is not historically strong in college that primarily serve women, and, in some cases, minorities. Thus, institutions with a strong service tradition such as mine (Spelman College) are lower in your rankings on that metric than may be deserved. We have very few ROTC members. But we have produced large numbers of teachers. All of our students engage in community service every semester they are here. We offer scholarships (the Bonner Scholars; see here: http://www.spelman.edu/students/current/community/bonnerscholars.shtml) predicated on community service. The buzzword here is "women who serve."
These are things you don't capture through ROTC counts.
Dave on September 05, 2009 10:25 AM:
All in all a pretty good approach. Is there any adjustment in the "science and engineering PhDs" category for the fact that many schools, especially smaller ones, don't have engineering programs?