Today is the biggest day of the calendar year for many college presidents: the annual release of the US News and World Report rankings of “America’s Best Colleges.” For better or worse, the rankings have become the most important measuring stick for elite institutions and the semi-elite colleges that wish to join them. They’ve also functioned as a playbook of sorts for institutions that are dissatisfied with their station and want to rise in the eyes of American families. Improve on the measures that US News uses to define “best,” and you’ll move from coach to first class.
The widely acknowledged problem is that those measures often have everything to do with who colleges admit and less to do with what colleges actually teach them while they’re there. The algorithm has changed somewhat over the years, but above all, these rankings are about prestige and selectivity. The magazine measures academic reputation (via a survey of faculty), admissions selectivity (what percentage of applicants get in, and how high are their SAT’s), financial resources, as well as outcome measures like retention and graduation rates. The fastest and most surefire way to climb the ranks is to attract better students, typically by raising SAT benchmarks, rejecting more applicants, and ensuring that admitted students choose to go (yield). Raising tuition doesn’t hurt either.
Recent history is full of high-risers who played the numbers game. George Washington University jacked its tuition, built nicer dorms, and lowered its admission rates from 49 percent to 33 percent over the course of the 2000’s. It went from being unranked in US News to #54 on the tally of national universities this year. (It was also unceremoniously dumped from the rankings for a time after "misreporting" data on the achievement of its students). University of Richmond increased the sticker price of tuition by 31 percent between 2004 and 2005 alone, and lowered its admit rate from 48 percent to 31 percent over the past decade. It went from being unranked on the national liberal arts ranking to #30 in those released today.
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Contrast this competition with what goes on in the rest of the economy. In most sectors, competition tends to benefit consumers, as firms work to attract customers by selling a quality product at a competitive price. Competition here implies trying to serve as many paying customers as possible in order to maximize market-share.
US News flips this kind of competition on its head. Colleges try to attract students by building more amenities, which leads them to charge more in tuition; then they strictly ration access to a chosen few. As they rise in the rankings and demand increases, it allows them to be even more selective. Prices rise and the good gets scarcer, making it even more appealing to consumers who want “the best.” The incessant pressure to climb the US News rankings may pay off for colleges (and their alumni), but it actually hurts students and families in the long run.
Enter the New York Times “Upshot,” which released new rankings today designed to “[push] back against college rankings that focus on prestige.” Instead, the Times’ rankings are supposed to measure “economic diversity” using a “College Access Index.”
To calculate it, the Times selected any college with a four-year graduation rate over 75 percent in 2012. They then ranked those colleges according to the percentage of their students who received a Pell Grant and the net price of attendance (after scholarships) paid by low to middle-income families. The rankings also report (but do not factor in) the amount of endowment per student—an effort to show that “endowment doesn’t determine economic diversity.”
At the top of the list? Small liberal arts colleges Vassar, Grinnell, Smith, and Amherst, as well as UNC-Chapel Hill, one of just three public universities that made it into the rankings. Harvard came in sixth place. (Princeton, US News’ top college in the country, ranked 34th on the Times list).
You’re probably thinking “what’s wrong with this ranking? Isn’t it an answer to US News?” Yes and no.
Let’s start with the saddest part about the list: there were only 98 four-year colleges that met the 75 percent benchmark. Almost all of them are small private schools (only three are larger public campuses: Chapel Hill, William and Mary, and UVA). There are more than 3,100 four-year colleges in the country. Only 98 graduate more than three-quarters of their students in four years? That’s three percent of institutions, people.
That brings us to the second problem: collectively, these schools serve about four percent of all full-time undergraduates. Most of the colleges on the list are very small, meaning even relatively high percentages of students receiving Pell Grants translate to relatively low raw numbers. Vassar—at the top of the list—enrolled 148 first-time students who got a Pell Grant in 2012-2013; Grinnell, in second, had 99 incoming Pell students that year. In contrast, UC Berkeley, not ranked because it had a 71 percent four-year grad rate, enrolled 7.5 times as many incoming Pell Grant students as Vassar, and 10 times as many as Grinnell (1,107). In all, as the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, the colleges ranked by the Times enroll just over 16,000 Pell students—an average of about 162 per campus. There were 8.9 million Pell recipients in 2012-2013. (Update: The 16,000 figure corresponds to first-time students receiving a Pell Grant at these institutions).
The point isn’t to knock Vassar or Grinnell for doing better than their peers, or the New York Times for shaming some wealthy colleges that are skinflints. Good for them. It’s to point out that “doing better” here represents less than a drop in the bucket. Only by elite college standards—those set by US News—would these numbers qualify as bastions of socioeconomic diversity. So while the Times rankings pat small liberal arts colleges on the back for “doing their part,” the incentive to remain small and selective severely limits their ability to improve economic mobility in the aggregate.
As long as we continue to define “the best colleges” as those that enroll the best students--as opposed to those that teach their students the most or deliver the best return on investment--rankings competition will do little to expand educational opportunity. Instead, we should spend less time worrying about rankings and more time increasing educational opportunity for the 96 percent of students who go elsewhere.
