The authors of the annual Washington Monthly College Guide and other higher education experts discuss what the Obama administration’s new focus on higher education means for the future of American colleges and universities.
Participants:
Paul Glastris, Editor, Washington Monthly
Kevin Carey, Policy Director, Education Sector
Ben Wildavsky, Senior Fellow, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Paul LeBlanc, President, Southern New Hampshire University
Robert Shireman, Deputy [...]
Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours talking to education officials from North Africa and the Near East who are in Washington DC as guests of the State Department, learning about our education system. Near the end of the discussion, I had the following exchange with an education official from a large but [...]
Colleges and universities distinguish themselves from one another in lots of different ways– scholarly reknown, the size of the endowment, success on the athletic fields, etc. But the most commonly-used measure is probably the “quality” of the freshman class, as measured by standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Average incoming SAT scores at University [...]
There’s been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University’s decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What’s been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here’s what they paid:
- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300
- 150 [...]
If you write enough blog posts on a given topic, eventually p.r. people will start emailing you stuff in hopes of getting a mention. So it was a while back when someone from RADAR magazine sent me an advance copy of their annual list of “America’s Worst Colleges.” It’s funny and some of it is [...]
The U.S. News & World Report college rankings will be irrelevant in three years and dead in ten. They will not be killed by outright competitors like the Princeton Review, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, or even the recent Forbes magazine rankings utilizing Ratemyprofessor.com. They’ll be slayed by a 20-something named Jordan Goldman.
Goldman is not [...]
The Yale Daily News reports that, in a “major statement,” Yale refused to fill out the U.S. News & World Report college rankings peer reputation survey this year, while also refusing to join other private colleges and universities in signing a letter promising to boycott said survey. To begin, this is only true if by “major” [...]
Like all good Ohio State University alumni (M.P.A. ‘95), I’ve been preparing to obsessively follow the highly-ranked Buckeyes football team from the pre-season all the way to the traditional blowout loss in the National Championship game on January 8th. But this year my loyalties are divided. I have a new favorite team: the aptly-named Mavericks [...]
Harvard edged ahead of Princeton this year in the annual least-meaningful-yet-most-publicized measure of higher education quality, the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This is like using advanced satellite telemetry to figure out which Himalayan peak is the world’s highest–marginally interesting in a trivial way, but beside the point, which is that they’re both [...]
America has bestowed many gifts on the world–baseball, comic books, the Internet (and really, what else is there?). To that list we can now add college rankings. First popularized by U.S. News & World Report in the early 1980s, rankings were, for a long time, strictly an American invention. But in recent years there’s been [...]
I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year having various conversations and arguments about college rankings, and one of the problems with the discussion is a tendency to intermingle critiques of rankings per se and critiques of specific rankings, e.g. those produced by U.S. News. For example, people often say things like [...]
A few weeks ago, I successfully predicted the exact number of points the University of Michigan would score against arch-rival Ohio State in their annual football showdown, thus outperforming legions of so-called sports experts while inadvertantly illustrating the fallacy of self-accountability in K-12 and higher education.
The prediction came at the annual meeting of the Association [...]
Today’s your lucky day. You, personally, can join the elite circle of infamous college rankers, and accrue all the notoriety it entails.
Here’s why: a few months ago, I wrote an article for Washington Monthly that included a ranking of “America’s Best Community Colleges,” along with a profile of Cascadia Community College, one of the best. [...]
More thoughts from last week’s trip to Shanghai for the 3rd Meeting of the International [College] Rankings Expert Group (IREG-3):
* You know how every time you go to some conference, they give you a little canvass tote bag filled with papers, folders, ID badges, and other sundry meeting materials, and you throw the bag away [...]
The Center on American Progress sponsored an event last week focused on college rankings. I was on the panel along with a representative of U.S. News & World Report, and recent late-night comedy star Paul Glastris. During the Q&A, I made a point that I try to make whenever someone gives me a chance, and [...]
In all the hubbub over this, that, or the other ranking of four-year colleges, the 45 percent of American undergraduates who attend a community college are left out. Those students are lower-class citizens in the higher ed world, the wide bottom layer of the status pyramid that ascends to the peaks of the Ivy League. [...]
I’m back from Costa Rica after 10 blissfully email / Internet / news-of-the-outside-world-free days, and while I’d still much rather be there than here, it’s nice to be here.
Right to business: the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings were released in my absence. The news cycle around this is funny, because there’s never [...]
Last week’s article in Time about a group of private college presidents trying to foment an anti-U.S. News & World Report rankings revolution has prompted a spate of follow-up, including this piece in the Yale Daily News. Yale President Richard Levin struck a note a note of skepticism:
Levin said that although he disagrees with the [...]
InsideHigherEd reports that the President of Arizona State University will get a financial bonus if ASU climbs in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. If the rankings were based on measures that actually had anything to do with student learning, this might not be a bad idea. But as it stands, the most likely [...]
Richard Vedder of Ohio University, an outspoken member of the recent Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, has a higher education blog called “Center for College Affordability and Productivity.” It’s smart, provocative and well worth reading. If there’s ever an award for “Least Bland Blog With the Most Bland Name,” it would definitely [...]
In this new Education Sector report, co-authors Erin Dillon and Robin V. Smiles discuss the growing problem of students defaulting on their student loans. Based on the experiences of a small group of Texas HBCUs and a new statistical analysis of cohort default rates, they argue that institutions play a significant role in helping students avoid default./a>
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
In this Education Sector report, Policy Analyst Chad Aldeman calls for a new approach to high school accountability. He argues that the best way to measure whether students are prepared for college or a career is by looking at what actually happens when students arrive at their intended destination.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.