The free speech rankings are out for colleges, and for some families that will be a factor in deciding what offers to accept. Sorry about the syntax:
Good luck!
Thank you. This is really important to our family.
I don’t doubt their sincerity, but It just feels like trying to get one’s arms around a pool of water. The “worst” college listed is a university not on my radar. Don’t know much about it. But, almost all the comments attached to that school seem to involve classroom discussions, and the picture I get is of a power differential that’s pretty common across the board and hasn’t changed much since Socrates. And, stated simply, it’s that the person in front of the room wins. And, especially nowadays, my sympathies go to the poor adjunct professor who has spent his or her life getting to be that person.
Reading the “methodology” behind the “rigorous analysis” they claim just had me shaking my head. This is just a survey of maybe 3% of the students of 55 of 4,000 degree granting institutions in the US.
Participants are recruited through web ads (self selecting) and they decide which to include and which not to. And weighting by some “factors”.
As noted, they may have good intentions, but it’s hard to weight this much more than a TripAdvisor or Yelp ranking.
Actually, it appears that students were sent emails through their universities. Self-selection of participation maybe, but this practice is supported by all major businesses and many government entities cities are posting surveys on their FB pages–this is the world of panel surveys–and college students are impossible to reach by outside entities. The response rate at one school that I follows was 154 out of 1500 students which seems pretty respectable, and since you are comparing the schools to each other all surveys would have equal bias.
“Actually” the methodology section specifically calls out “web advertising, permission-based email campaigns, and partnerships with university-affiliated organizations.”
Self-selected clickbait and selecting from a mailing list and organizations already aligned with a “free speech” organization is not a random sample.
Using their school email address to contact them verifies they are school students, it does nothing to generate a representative cross section.
Sending emails to verified .edu addresses from a College Republicans Clubs of America member list would similarly not somehow make it a demographically representative.
I do agree that all school responses are probably equally biased. Unbiased, representative sampling is better than equally biased selective sampling, IMHO.
Actually, RichInPitt–do you work for a university? Academics always attack the methodology.
No one claimed it was a pure random sample with statistical precision. I have two kids who took this survey through different universities and clearly the universities provided the email list because the emails are private. Incentives were offered to participate. There is always response bias in any survey, and several attempts were made to get students to participate.
As a research professional, I can barely get college students to participate for any type of study, so the methodology looks sound to me if you can get even a few of them to participate. One thing for sure, companies use convenience samples (AKA panels) all the time to make major decisions that are at best-- contaminated convenience samples with professional respondents.
Even our city is using convenience samples to determine how they are spending their tax dollars and the survey link is almost a secret. I am not saying it is right, but it seems to be an acceptable methodology these days.
No disrespect to academia, but a lot of dissertations, especially in psychology, are based on random samples of college students (clearly convenience samples even though they were statistically drawn) and the results are generalized to the general public all the time.
But, how else can FIRE get feedback? Clearly, the offenders, the universities, are not capable of policing themselves. I have NOT seen a lot of surveys conducted by universities testing the status of free speech on campus. I also do not see a lot of published dissertations studying free speech or freedom of expression on campus either.
A good university would provide their student lists and subjective them to this study, but, shouldn’t everyone want to be aligned with the “Free Speech” agenda?