Lists That Rank Colleges’ Value Are on the Rise – NYTimes.com

• Lists That Rank Colleges’ Value Are on the Rise – NYTimes.com

  Ranking fever grows but does the ranking fever include student and parent input? And are these rankings good or bad listed on a college’s website and who can judge? Ultimately that is up to the student.

  tags: education learning students colleges value nytimes com tuition fees

  • James Muyskens was feeling proud one recent afternoon, and why not?

  • The college he had led for the past 11 years had just been awarded second place in a new ranking of American higher education

  • The college is Queens College, a part of the City University of New York with an annual tuition of $5,730, and a view of the Long Island Expressway

  • Queens does not typically find itself at the top of national rankings.

  • It was a list of colleges that offer the “best bang for the buck.”

  • But dollars-and-cents tabulations like that one (which was compiled by Washington Monthly), are the fastest-growing sector of the college rankings industry, with ever more analyses vying for the attention of high school students and their parents who are anxious about finances.

  • Should Mr. Obama’s plan come to pass, value would not just be a selling point for colleges, it would be a matter of life and death.

  • “It’s a quest for the holy grail,”

  • U.S. News and World Report, whose academic rankings have long been derided — and obsessively followed — by college presidents, now publishes “best value” lists as well.

  • Forbes Magazine got in the is-it-worth-the-money game too, as did, among others, The Wall Street Journal, The Alumni Factor, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Payscale, a company that gathers data about the job market.

  • Queens College did splendidly in a list that emphasizes social mobility and civic virtue. Another New York City public college, Baruch, took third place; No. 1 was Amherst.

  • And when the Education Trust, an advocacy group, set out to list the colleges that do right by low-income students, it found only five entries, including Queens.

  • Arne Duncan, the education secretary, has said that his goal is a ratings system, not a single first-place-to-last-place ranking, and that the ratings will compare only schools that are similar in their mission, their student population and so on

  • “We’ll be looking at access,” Mr. Duncan said in a recent speech, “such as the percentage of students receiving Pell grants. We’ll be looking at affordability, like average tuition, scholarships and loan debt. And we’ll be looking at outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, alumni satisfaction surveys, graduate earnings and the advanced degrees of college graduates.”

  • Carolyn Hoxby, a Stanford professor and an author of an influential study about the failures of college as an engine for social mobility, said the effort is doomed to fail.

  • “I think it’s more likely that it will be harmful to students.”

  • “One, a lot of information about the outcomes for students — sometimes obvious things, like earning and employment, but also whether they serve in the public sector, whether they give back to society, do people have stable families, how do their kids turn out, do they end up dependent on social programs.”

  • “You’d say they have all these great outcomes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the value added by those colleges, because their students were terrific” to begin with.

  • the necessary data is just not available at this time.

  • So someone devising an algorithm to measure the value of a college’s degree might want to factor in first-year salaries.

  • The rankings approach is working just fine for Queens College, which will prominently feature the Washington Monthly honor in its new recruitment materials, but even its president has his misgivings.

  • Dr. Muyskens said, “and I know that if we go too far on the value added and cost, we’re going to have people too focused on the practical to explore.”

  • He is proud of the school’s high score, but he said, “If it isn’t balanced by other perspectives, it’s dangerous.”

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