Someone needs to tell U.S. News & World Report‘s Robert Morse that data he says he wants to include in his magazine’s high school rankings are already available. In a short interview with the Education Writers Association’s Emily Richmond, Morse said:

The rankings don’t tell us how students do once they leave a high-scoring high school – for exContinue Reading »

Ever since the White House introduced its College Scorecard, critics have emerged from every corner (including my colleague Jeff Selingo on this blog yesterday). The Scorecard is incomplete and does not evaluate the proper measures, we are told. Selecting a university and judging quality based on five variables limits and insults what a college education is all about. The data is too general anContinue Reading »

The fourth capability of Education Sector’s new Higher Ed Data Central that we would like to highlight (see links for the first, second, and third capabilities) is the ability to combine data from different databases. For example, merging U.S. News and World Report college rankings with Department of Education IPEDS data allows us to investigate various relationships, such as the chart below shContinue Reading »

Quick Hits is a short compilation of question-raising news stories, blog posts, and video clips that Education Sector team members are reading or viewing each day.

I heartily recommend Daniel DeVise’s profile of Trinity Washington University president Pat McGuire in this weekend’s Washington Post magazine. McGuire and her colleagues embody much of what is good and right about higher education. By transforming a failing women’s college into thriving university dedicated to serving minority and first-generation students, she is working in Continue Reading »

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 probably even true. Topping off the list for the second year is the University Continue Reading »

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 bringing us another set of rankContinue Reading »

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. The rankings were Continue Reading »

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 sometimes even when they don’t, which is that the problem of constantly-risingContinue Reading »

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 outcome will be to further drive up student costs. Why? Because of the way the U.Continue Reading »