-
A New Member Joins the Law Ranking Club
Tweet Share on Facebook February 27, 2008 Comment (3)U.S. News extends a warm welcome to the Green Bag, a law journal that says that it intends to start its own law school rankings. The "Deadwood Report...will assess a law school's faculty using various measures." The journal's editors expect the first results to be published sometime during 2009.
Is another set of law school rankings really necessary? In an abstract of an article titled "Fair Warning to Law Schools...and an Invitation to 1Ls, 2Ls & 3Ls," Ross Davies, faculty member at George Mason University School of Law and editor-in-chief of the Green Bag, says:
-
Do Top Colleges Enroll Enough Pell Grant Students?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 22, 2008 Comment (3)Are the leading U.S. universities doing enough to get more students from lower-income families to enroll in their institutions? Are recently announced initiatives to increase financial aid, reduce loans, and decrease parental contributions helping to bring more of the nation's neediest students to the nation's top-ranked schools?
The answer so far is a clear no, based on a December 2007 article in Postsecondary Education Opportunity titled "Pell Grant Enrollment at America's 'Best' Universities and Colleges FY 2000 to FY 2008" by Thomas G. Mortenson. A higher-education policy analyst, Mortenson looked at universities and liberal arts colleges that ranked in the top half of the National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges categories in the U.S. News 2008 America's Best Colleges rankings to determine trends of enrollment of undergraduate students with Pell Grants (federally funded need-based aid to students from low- and middle-income families) at those schools. It found that between fiscal year 2000 and 2006, there was a 36.7 percent increase in the number of Pell Grant recipients nationwide. But among the schools in the top half of the U.S. News National Universities ranking, the total number of Pell Grant recipients increased by just 9.2 percent in this time period. Even more startling is that among the schools in the top half of the U.S. News Liberal Arts Colleges' ranking, the total number of students receiving Pell Grants declined by 1.9 percent.
-
Students to Colleges: Rankings Not-So Important
Tweet Share on Facebook February 14, 2008 Comment (4)It turns out the constant claim made by many college presidents and admission deans that the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings are the main reason that students choose one school over another is just a myth. The recently released "UCLA Freshman Survey: Fall 2007" provides scientific evidence to disprove the notion that the rankings are what drive student choice. The report says:
[The survey] data indicate that incoming college students might be reacting to the national debates on measuring the quality of college education and accountability by weighting related factors more heavily in their admissions decisions. If they are, national rankings are not playing a large role in their thoughts. While the importance of rankings in national magazines increased by 1.3 percentage points in 2007, it's still the case that only a very small percentage (17.6 percent) of college freshmen report that the rankings are 'very important' in their decision.
-
How the Rankings Affect State Education Spending
Tweet Share on Facebook February 11, 2008 CommentAre the U.S. News college rankings influencing higher education policy? The answer appears to be yes. The article "The Power of Information: Do Rankings Affect the Public Finance of Higher Education?" by Ginger Zhe Jin from the University of Maryland and the National Bureau of Economic Research and Alexander Whalley from the University of California-Merced says that "While there are now over 100 college guidebooks, the market is still dominated by U.S.News & World Report." The paper then examines "whether public colleges respond to one incentive provided by U.S. News: increasing expenditure per student."
-
Why Comparison Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook February 4, 2008 Comment (2)Can higher education in the U.S. have real accountability without comparability? Should each college be in charge of determining its own standards for student success? Is the tuition- and tax-paying public best served by having thousands of student learning and accountability systems, virtually one per college? The answer to all of these questions for prospective college students, their parents, and the public is a resounding no. Accountability needs to be comparable for it to succeed. The public needs to be able to use the information to gauge one college against another. If schools are internally measuring whether they are doing a good job for their students, then the public also should be able to use that data as part of the college search process. Applicants need to be able to readily compare which schools are doing the best job in terms of student outcomes. Without such comparability between universities, there will not be real accountability.
Yet, higher education appears to be going in the opposite direction, backing principles of accountability that will turn the entire process into one that creates one assessment tool for each college and doesn't even include the requirement for comparability, according to the article "Calling Out Colleges on Student Learning" in insidehighered.com. The lack of a mandate for comparability was made clear at the 2008 annual meeting of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) when leaders of CHEA and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and other heads of higher education associations representing more than 3,000 colleges and universities put out a statement of principles of student learning outcomes.
It can be hoped that over time leaders in higher education will come to believe that being open and comparable is in the best interests of those that they say it's their mission to serve: students.
