A silly mistake that American parents often make is to look at the U.S. News college rankings and say, “Well, this school is higher ranked than that one, so let’s send Johnny there.” The U.S. News rankings, long the monopolist in the field, tell you almost nothing about the quality of education you can expect at a school. Over the last few years, other rankings have been developed, and some seem to be better. What should families do?
In today’s Martin Center article, Chris Corrigan surveys the landscape of college rankings and finds a few bright spots. “Forbes, for example, releases a yearly list of the top 650 undergraduate institutions based on a ‘consumer-centric approach,’ according to Caroline Howard, director of editorial operations. The methodology for Forbes’s rankings skews towards the students themselves, heavily weighting such factors as alumni salary, student debt, and the student experience on campus.”
That’s more useful than the input-dominated U.S. News approach.
The Wall Street Journal has also gotten into the college-ranking business, and Corrigan sees some value in its system, writing, “As such, the WSJ rankings place emphasis on student outcomes such as graduation rate, years to pay off net price, and salary impact versus similar colleges. The result is a heterodox and controversial ranking that includes some of the usual suspects in the top-20 but also such small private schools as Babson and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Some Ivies rank as low as 67th.”
Still, those rankings do little if anything to measure educational value added. Corrigan suggests that we need an exam to measure student intellectual growth during college. Such exams have found no favor with colleges, possibly because the results might show that many students learn very little.