An Alternative Approach To College Rankings

Here's something interesting for anyone frustrated by the methodology used in the USNWR annual college rankings. The Washington Monthly has published its own list based on an entirely different set of criteria, and,not surprisingly, the list looks a lot different.

The USNWR criteria are summarized here, but fall into 7 general categories: Peer Assessment (i.e. reputation) - 25%, Retention(% of freshman who return)- 20-25%, Faculty resources - 20%; Admissions Selectivity - 15%, Financial Resources - 10%, Graduation Rate - 5% and Alumni Giving - 5%.

I have never been a big fan of these criteria or of the relative weightings assigned to them because the seem to be less designed to measure the quality of the education and educational experience than to assure that Harvard, Princeton and Yale are always on top.

The Washington Monthly apparently had a similar problem and came up with a completely different set of criteria:

The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service. We designed our evaluation system accordingly.

(For a more detailed breakdown on how they measured colleges and universities on these criteria see this "Note on Methodology").

Using these criteria, the came up with the following rankings, which, not surprisingly, look quite different from the USNWR rankings:



I don't know whether the WM criteria are the right ones either. Frankly, they seem a bit biased in favor of an egalitarian impulse. But it is interesting to look at how colleges and universities stack up on criteria other than reputation.