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Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Ask Not What Your University Can Do For You

I reported last week that influential inside-the-beltway and left-of-center magazine Washington Monthly had conducted its first-ever college rankings. Its free website published only the top 30 finishers, among which Dartmouth was nowhere to be found. The complete data has been forwarded to me, and I see that the College on the Hill placed 37 overall among 245 national universities.



Everyone agrees that the US News and World Report rankings are compelling incentives for colleges to change their ways, not because of the validity of their methods but because of the sheer penetration made by the annual “story” that is their release.

The article accompanying Washington Monthly’s ratings concludes this way:

Imagine, then, what would happen if thousands of schools were suddenly motivated to try to boost their scores on The Washington Monthly College Rankings. They’d start enrolling greater numbers of low-income students and putting great effort into ensuring that these students graduate. They’d encourage more of their students to join the Peace Corps or the military. They’d intensify their focus on producing more Ph.D. graduates in science and engineering. And as a result, we all would benefit from a wealthier, freer, more vibrant, and democratic country.

I think these are rather fair conclusions, and they also provide an excellent summary of how the rankings were compiled. Dartmouth placed #37 overall (compared to #9 in the US News list), notably above Carnegie Mellon (41), Brown (43), Princeton (44), NYU (46), California Institute of Technology (63), and Tufts (75).

Details on methodology can be found here, but basically, the criteria were: percent of student with Pell grants, graduation rate, change in graduation rates, size of research grants, number of Ph. D.s awarded, (ranked) percentage of students in Peace Corps or ROTC, and the percentage of federal grants spent on community service.

Obviously, many of these factors favor large schools and many favor state schools. Amalgams like Cornell, which is large, public, private, and everything in between, did well. In many of them, there seems to be room for Dartmouth to improve.

But these are not definitive rankings by any means. Washington Monthly endeavored to measure only how well colleges contribute to the American public good, through education of the populace, life-saving research, and national defense. To the question, “What do universities do for the average American?” I think the answer from these numbers comes back, “Quite a bit.”

And, of course, the Ivy Leaguers and their ilk are not charged with too many patriotic duties. (Unless they accept some federal funding and then, rightly, they are required to allow military recruiters on campus.) These are private schools, after all. Their mission is to educate the pre-approved and the pre-disposed. They carve out that customer base through tough application processes and even tougher invoices.

But as freshmen file in to these elite schools every year, a certain percentage of them are unlikely suspects. Perhaps they are from the lower-class, have a low income, are not legacies, are recent immigrants, or are the first person in their family to go to college. They are at a Dartmouth, a Harvard, or a Yale courtesy of special aid and outreach. This is crucial for private schools to do, since it creates upward social mobility in academia. But of course it doesn’t happen on the same scale as in public schools.

Comparing all these differently-situated schools without regard to the stratified nature of academia, then, may not be an especially great idea. But there is some good that comes of it: a positive goal for the future.

Posted on August 30, 2005 04:10 PM. Permalink