Rank colleges? Or rank students?

An essay in today’s NY Times by David Leonhardt is generally dismissive of the U.S. News college rankings:

By now, 23 years after U.S. News got into this game, the responses have become pretty predictable. Disappointed college officials dismiss the ranking as being beneath the lofty aims of a university, while administrators pleased with their status order new marketing materials bragging about it — and then tell anyone who asks that, obviously, they realize the ranking is beneath the lofty aims of a university.

There are indeed some silly aspects to the U.S. News franchise and its many imitators. The largest part of a university’s U.S. News score, for instance, is based on a survey of presidents, provosts and admissions deans, most of whom have never sat in a class at the colleges they’re judging.

That’s made it easy to dismiss all the efforts to rate colleges as the product of a status-obsessed society with a need to turn everything, even learning, into a competition. As Richard R. Beeman, a historian and former dean at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued, “The very idea that universities with very different institutional cultures and program priorities can be compared, and that the resulting rankings can be useful to students, is highly problematic.”

But Mr. Leonhardt doesn’t quite get it, because the status obsession isn’t irrational. As I previously pointed out, the most prestigious college degrees lead to the best life outcomes.

For people who attend college just to party for four years, nothing is more important than the college’s prestige. Four years of partying at a community college is just a big waste, but four years of partying at Yale can lead to a job as President of the United States.

Mr. Leonhardt suggests some supposedly better ways to rank universities, and while that would be useful, it would be even more useful to rank students in addition to ranking universities. Each graduating student should take standardized tests, both general and specific to his major, and these tests should be certified and available to employers, so employers could hire the most educated students instead of the most prestigious degreed.

However, if we are going to rank universities, the way I see it the only really important criterion is how much money someone with a specific major will make when he graduates. Every college should report labor force outcomes, broken down by major, and the results should be audited by independent auditors and reported in a standardized format so colleges can be compared.

Comments

[Jody]

I think most engineers take the EIT exam and I think most schools know how well they do on it in comparison to other universities (statistic were crowed when I took it at Va Tech). Likewise GRE, GMAT, and MCAT scores could be used in other fields

So there may be stand-ins already available without introducing another standardized test.

[SFG]

"four years of partying at Yale can lead to a job as President of the United States"

I think that only works if your daddy was President to begin with. ;)
Replace 'President' with BIGLAW and you are, of course, correct.

"Mr. Leonhardt suggests some supposedly better ways to rank universities, and while that would be useful, it would be even more useful to rank students in addition to ranking universities. Each graduating student should take standardized tests, both general and specific to his major, and these tests should be certified and available to employers, so employers could hire the most educated students instead of the most prestigious degreed."
Maybe for Microsoft and Google. I think most employers want rich, well-connected people from Harvard, not smart people. They don't want smart people!

[dearieme]

On hiring: as you may know, British bachelor degrees are usually classified according to how well you did in your exams - First, Second or Third Class. The old saying is "First class men hire first class men; second class men hire third class men."

[Half Sigma]

SFG: "I think most employers want rich, well-connected people from Harvard, not smart people."

I don't believe that employers really know what they want. The existence of a very visible rating of how much a person learned in college would by it's important nature add to the mix of what's considered.

[superdestroyer]

HS,

I think there is a lot of existing data that you help students choose an university.

The first would a publication of the numbers of degrees award for each degree field for each university. It would help applicates decide if the university is misrepresenting itself. Each University should also have to provide median SAT score of entering freshmen, median GRE, MCAT, LSAT, etc of all of its graduates. This would be the easiest indication which universities add very little and which help students achieve. It would also be nice if all universities had to report the number of A's, B's, C's, Passes, awarded each calender year. If a university is awarded 75% A's, then people could determine if the university is really teaching anything. The schools should also be forced to report the number of drops without grades allowed.

Then the government/media/book publishers. can rank order the entering SAT score and the exiting GRE score and see which universities slide from admission to graduation and which advanced. However, the government would need to set the standard for how the media SAT score is calculated.

The goverment should also provide reporting mechanism for calcuating actually graduation rates. This should include accounting for each student admitted and reporting after four years whether the student graduated, still attending, or dropped out. This would help applicnts sort out the lies that most universities tell about their graduation rates.

[Robert Hume]

Plot average SAT of those admitted versus percentile points of income of graduates at different ages and look for the outliers of the trends.

Positive outliers could be because the college is great or because of college prestige.

But before opening mouth it would be good to have the data.

[ChrisV82]

"Every college should report labor force outcomes, broken down by major, and the results should be audited by independent auditors and reported in a standardized format so colleges can be compared."

I'm sure I'm being redundant, but this should apply to graduate, doctorate and professional programs as well.

[The Superfluous Man]

I read on a collegeboard (collegeconfidential.com) that South Korea publishes the results of its standardized tests, meaning the scores of all the students who scored high enough to get into the prestigious universities there (Yonsei, Korea, Seoul).

[The Superfluous Man]

I read on a collegeboard (collegeconfidential.com) that South Korea publishes the results of its standardized tests, meaning the scores of all the students who scored high enough to get into the prestigious universities there (Yonsei, Korea, Seoul).