<p>The</a> Quick and the Ed</p>
<p>The article advocates colleges and universities devise a ranking system of their own:</p>
<p>“Colleges can cede that responsiblity–and thus, control over their destiny–to for-profit newsmagazines. Or they can come together and seize that power back by defining and standing behind rankings of their own.”</p>
<p>This is a pipe dream. Colleges cannot even negotiate a workable national football championship system, how can we expect them to establish a system to identify the academic pecking order?</p>
<p>It would be amusing to watch the clash of egos and vested interests, however. How about a new reality TV series?</p>
<p>Said perfectly senior’s dad.</p>
<p>The best way to rank universities would be to form a government agency (non-profit and neutral) whose sole purpose would be to rank universities. That department or unit would have access to all the necessary data and surveys (i.e., not rely on universities providing their own data). In other words, it would be empowered to audit all data provided, from class size to average class rank/GPA and SAT/ACT etc…</p>
<p>^^ EEEK! The Government ranking universities? How awful that would be!</p>
<p>Colleges believing themselves under-rated (which would be all of them except, maybe, number one) would be all over their members of Congress to intervene with the “non-profit and neutral” agency. Congress would be constantly barraged by colleges to revisit the agency’s criteria to make them more fair.</p>
<p>We’d need to extend campaign finance reform rules to ensure that well-endowed but under-performing universities don’t corrupt the ranking system through the wholesale purchase of Congressmen/women.</p>
<p>The agency would spend $700 Billion to determine the relative rankings of New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, NM, Brewton-Parker College in Mount Vernon, GA, Jackson Hole Bible College in Jackson, WY, and Goldey-Beacom College in Wilmington, DE.</p>
<p>The only good that would come of such system is Congress would get so enthralled in the college rankings process that it could do no other mischief. There is much to be said for that.</p>
<p>Actually, if colleges were required to make prospectus-like disclosures of the results of their operations, at least people could go into the college selection process with their eyes open.</p>
<p>Nobody cared about ranking 20 years ago so I’m sure we could live without them.</p>
<p>Colleges should get together and compile rankings by category (e.g. endowment per student, selectivity, faculty resources, etc.) and then anyone can weight the set of criteria however they want. Get rid of the peer assessment and also, get an independent auditor to verify the information.</p>
<p>Why just endowment per student? That is unfair to large universities just as overall endowment would be unfair to small universities. I think both overall endowment and endowment per student should be taken into consideration. And the Peer Assessment is crucial. Like it or not, it is an indicator of how much respect graduate school admissions committees allocate to an undergraduate institution.</p>
<p>Undergraduate education results matter to parents and in-coming students.</p>
<p>Rather than focusing on endowments and anecdotal peer assessments, wouldn’t more useful information focus on an institution’s educational results?</p>
<p>I’d like to know:</p>
<p>To what graduate and professional schools does the UG school send its graduates broken down by major, by entering SAT/ACT scores, and by UG GPA.</p>
<p>What an UG school’s graduates score on GRE/LSAT/MCAT/GMAT, broken down by major, by entering SAT/ACT scores, and by UG GPA.</p>
<p>What is the UG school’s graduation rates broken down by major and by entering SAT/ACT scores and high school GPA. Graduation over what time periods.</p>
<p>What are the average GPAs earned at that institution broken down by major and by entering SAT/ACT scores and high school GPA.</p>
<p>There are tons of other ways useful information could be disclosed to the public about a school’s results.</p>
<p>UG schools have ready access to such information. They should be required to compile and disclose it.</p>
<p>Agreed 100% Senior’s Dad. Anoyher source that can help are the graduate schools themselves. They are in a unique position and possess a veritable fountain of information. Every graduate program at every major university can break down the information by institution. How many Brown University students applied to Harvard Law School. What was their average GPA and LSAT score? How many were admitted? What was their average GPA and LSAT score? Harvard Law school (as well as all top 50 Law schools) can easily produce such a database for all applicants. And not just Law programs. MBA programs can do the same, as can Medical Schools, graduate schools of Engineering and PhD programs.</p>
<p>
You could list both.
You could replace the Peer Assessment with graduate school admissions stats.</p>
<p>I agree with both Luckie. As my post above suggests, graduate schools should help out as they have all the information needed to complete a graduate school admissions database to end all databases!</p>
<p>I don’t really agree that Senior Dad has posted data that would be all that useful in assessing student learning or outcomes at universities and colleges in the US.</p>
<p>I’m surprised that people think that kind of data is useful for summative assessments of universities. I’m not even sure there should be or can be effective summative assessments at universities and the fact that this is a widely accepted assumption troubles me.</p>
<p>Modestmelody, I would not condone a ranking based on those data, but I thin the data can be indicative of quality.</p>
<p>modestmelody: In a democracy, transparency is always a good thing, especially transparency in powerful institutions such as colleges and universities.</p>
<p>I was very happy to learn that my daughter’s first choice school, a tiny LAC, places two-thirds of its graduates in graduate or professional schools, that just over ten percent of a recent class applied to law school, and that, of that approximately ten percent who applied, 95% were enrolled in law school their first year after graduation (and, therefore, at least 95% necessarily were admitted to law school).</p>
<p>Because my daughter wants to go to law school or graduate school, it’s important that the undergraduate school she selects out of high school leads there. Her chosen LAC’s success makes it easier for her to choose to go there rather than to the household name flagship state university where she’d be one of fifty thousand.</p>
<p>It would be nice if other schools disclosed as much information about their success in placing students in postgraduate programs as my daughter’s choice LAC. That way, we’d be more able (I don’t claim we’d be perfectly able) to compare colleges and universities other than on the basis of name recognition.</p>
<p>Disclosing entering SAT/ACT scores in a way that are linked to postgraduate school admissions lets in-coming students and their parents assess their chances of postgraduate school admission after spending four years at the particular institution.</p>
<p>For example, if 75% of the students at UG school A who scored 700/700/700 on the SAT get admitted to top 15 law schools, that is a strong indication that top 15 law schools like the kind of student produced by UG school A. More importantly, it is a good indication that if your kid has a 700/700/700 SAT score and puts forth similar effort at UG school A, there’s a good chance your kid will also get admitted to a top 15 law school as well.</p>
<p>Maybe a more important disclosure would be UG school B, which never has placed a 700/700/700 student in a top 15 law school. That strongly suggests that your 700/700/700 scoring kid might have a bit of a problem getting into a top 15 law school after four years at UG school B.</p>
<p>Those two scenarios (both understandably unlikely) do not definitively speak to the relative quality of UG school A and UG school B, but they do provide a basis for choosing one school over the other if attending a top 15 law school is one’s desire.</p>
<p>Public companies are required to publish their financial results of operations. Colleges and universities ought to be required to publish the results of their educational operations.</p>
<p>Requiring to publish data and publishing the specific data you’re citing are two very different things. I’m not going to get into a wonky-social science argument with you, but I’d recommend looking into how educational data is tracked and the criticism of that right now in the states. It speaks quite a bit as to why information of that type used in this fashion is not nearly as useful as far more disaggregated data that’s not used in summative way, but rather, continues to be disaggregated and understood not as any kind of average.</p>
<p>There is so much information lost in any of the measures you’ve produced that none of that data would be particularly indictative of anything.</p>
<p>Human beings have a need to rank. American Idol is built on that premise. But if you want a wonk-free assessment methodology for colleges and universities, I recommend reading their online student newspapers. The capability of the student cohort - which for me is the most important criterion in institutional quality - seems to be reflected pretty well in what comes out in print.</p>
<p>Sorry, I am not a social science wonk.</p>
<p>It seems to me common sensical, though, that an undergraduate school’s record placing graduates in graduate and professional schools is an important factor that a parent or in-coming student might wish to consider when admission into post-graduate programs is an important aspiration.</p>
<p>Common sense also dictates that who, among an UG school’s student cohort, gets into post-graduate programs is also an important factor such parents and students should consider when choosing an UG school.</p>
<p>Colleges and universities have this sort of information. My bet is they make extensive use of it internally. Why shouldn’t they be required to disclose what they know and the social scientists among us, yourself included, can debate what information is relevant and what is not.</p>
<p>Secrecy doesn’t serve the public good.</p>
<p>We don’t collect that sort of information in that way internally. We could, but it’s not actually all that meaningful-- anything that would suggest that either GPA or SAT scores are adequate predictors of outcomes post-college is guaranteed to disappoint anyone looking to that data as an indicator for their child. Just like median SAT score is not an accurate predictor of your admissions result at a school, neither would GPA or SAT be an accurate predictor of what comes after, the exception being really law school and possibly med school, where that information is largely available as part of premed advising but largely unavailable to prospective students for good reason (it doesn’t mean anything to a prospective student that getting a 3.8 at Brown means you can get into pretty much any medical school because getting a 3.8 at Brown doesn’t mean anything to anybody who’s not a Brown student). More importantly, even with medical school these numbers, when looked at as averages, are devoid of significant information that really details how a school is doing or tells you anything about student outcome.</p>
<p>What you really should ask is what does that college view as its goals for undergraduates and what examples exist from people who have recently graduated demonstrating having reached those goals.</p>
<p>Is it more meaningful that 70% of students went straight to graduate school or that those who wanted to go to graduate school had no trouble being accepted wherever they wanted to be? One is a data point that tells you nothing of student population and nothing about the quality of programs attended or about why they would choose a program that one person may view as being of lesser quality. The other looks at how well a university facilitates students reaching the goals they set for themselves and the goals the university sets for them. None of that is measured in the data you’ve proposed or in any ranking system I’ve seen.</p>
<p>I strongly agree with Senior’s Dad’s proposition. I don’t think it would ever be done, but it would be definitely helpful.</p>
<p>The best known schools work to limit and control information available to parents. The less that is known about the correlates of admission and after school performance, the more important prior reputation is and the harder it becomes for newcomers to visibly displace them. Hence, it becomes harder for Unknown Institute to say “Hey look: We have higher value added than Old School!” in a way that’s credible and easily verifiable.</p>
<p>Can rankings be abused? Of course. But this is true of any goods. If you look at fuel efficiency or cubic capacity of cars, customers can make a fetish of them and overlook good cars that don’t do well on those metrics. [Indeed, the megapixel race in cameras is a lot like this. Many foolishly believe that a 14 megapixel cam is usually “better” than a 7MP cam.] But if we had the data, it would be up to individuals and scholars to decide what margins were important to them. Nonetheless, many schools make the claims that the non-objective factors they look at “do” match up with life outcomes while withholding data that would allow researchers to evaluate their claims. Of course, it is possible for leadership skills or athletic ability to make up for test scores or poor grades but what if they don’t? If a school deems the ability to milk yurts as a valuable “skill” and then we find that all 100 students admitted to top school Theta were the only students admitted who couldn’t hack law school afterwards, that would be an important datum.</p>
<p>As a researcher, I have often tried to get more detailed student info – to be used carefully – to check relations between observed variables at time of admission and final outcomes, but to no avail. I have often been struck by how secretive private schools are. If not for the common data sets, I doubt they would even provide that much info. [For example, schools will not even reveal what the full range of SAT scores were for accepted students – just the 25th-75th percentile numbers.]</p>
<p>So absent governmental mandates, I suspect transparency will only be a pipe dream.</p>