Ever since U.S. News & World Report published its first college rankings back in 1983, Americans have been obsessed with getting into schools based on their perceived quality. Supposedly, you’d get a better education at a highly ranked institution than at a lower-ranked one.
In today’s Martin Center article, William Casement takes a careful look at this phenomenon and finds it empty.
The rankings used to be almost entirely about inputs — the faculty, the buildings, the library, etc. — with the assumption that more must mean better. That has shifted in recent years, however.
Casement writes:
Inputs are not entirely gone. They still have a presence in Money’s formula and carry considerable weight in U.S. News’s in spite of the image it wants to cultivate. But the logic behind outcomes is dominant — the idea that a ranking formula is a recipe, such that what should be rated is the final product rather than the particular ingredients. Thus, factors like SAT scores, faculty salaries, spending per student, and prestige have lost favor to calculations about graduation rates, alumni earnings, and debt, with new rankings often including a value-added calculation that gives credit to otherwise unheralded schools.
What is still ignored, he argues, is the learning process. That’s very hard to assess, he explains:
What is needed is for expert observers to go inside college classrooms to see what is really going on. If this were done using a standard evaluation tool, we might have a reasonably accurate picture of student learning. Several such tools are available, for instance from the Lumina Foundation and the Association of American Colleges and Universities, but practicality gets in the way of applying them on a mass scale.
And, I’d add, there is the problem that schools can vary greatly from department to department, professor to professor. Read the whole thing.