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Researchers Discuss the Higher Ed Act
Tweet Share on Facebook October 23, 2008 Comment (7)I recently returned from the 2008 Southern Association for Institutional Research Conference in Memphis. I go to these conferences in the United States and around the world to give talks on the Best Colleges rankings, find out the latest trends at universities, determine what new higher education data U.S. News should try to collect, and get feedback. I made one presentation: "America's Best Colleges Rankings: What Just Happened and What's Ahead."
The impact on colleges and students of the recently passed Higher Education Opportunity Act was discussed at length there. The HEOA includes provisions aimed at making more information available so that the public can better understand and respond to the rising cost of a college education. The act calls for the U.S. Department of Education to collect and publish on its website College Navigator a wide variety of information on college affordability, the net price of attending college by income level for those receiving student aid, which schools are raising tuitions more than others, and other consumer topics, including the time it takes to complete a degree at that college, alternative tuition plans, and information for disabled students.
There was also an update on the now two-year-old Voluntary System of Accountability project, which is a partnership between the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The VSA's goal is to provide students with comparable information on public institutions in a standardized format called College Portraits. The VSA deserves a lot of credit for being the only such effort underway that will include comparative data on student engagement as well as information on student learning outcomes. There is good news, too: As of October 18, nearly 60 percent (309 schools) of the 520 member institutions of the two higher education associations have agreed to participate in the project, and over 200 have already posted College Portraits. These colleges enroll some 3 million undergraduates, nearly 60 percent of the total undergraduate enrollment in four-year public colleges and universities. But there's a potential cloud on the horizon: Because the VSA system is, by definition, voluntary, it's unclear what proportion of four-year public colleges will end up participating and making all their information public.
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Will Paying for SAT Scores Boost Baylor's Ranking?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2008 Comment (9)Baylor University's policy of paying already admitted and enrolled students to retake the SAT test so the school possibly can use the improved scores to pursue a higher spot in the America's Best Colleges ranking is causing a lot soul searching in academia. The New York Times, Inside Higher Education, and Chronicle of Higher Education have all weighed in with stories that criticize the practice.
The Baylor Lariat, Baylor University's student newspaper, which broke the story, has written extensively on the controversy surrounding Baylor's policy of paying students a $300 book credit at the school store for retaking the SAT test after they'd already been admitted to the fall 2008 class. If the additional test improved their SAT composite score (on the Critical Reading and Math parts of the SAT) by 50 points or more, they got an additional $1,000 merit-based "Baylor Scholarship."
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Best Colleges: Programs to Look For
Tweet Share on Facebook October 15, 2008 Comment (3)If you are looking for colleges that have unique academic programs, visit the Programs to Look For section of our website.
We felt that it was important to look at innovative things that schools do that go well beyond the America's Best Colleges rankings. With the help of education experts, including staff members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, for the seventh consecutive year we identified eight such types of programs that have been shown to enhance learning experiences. We then invited college presidents, chief academic officers, deans of students, and deans of admissions from over 1,400 schools to nominate up to 10 institutions with stellar examples of each program type. We list in alphabetical order the ones that were mentioned most often.
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Preparing for Our First Ranking of Law School Part-Time Programs
Tweet Share on Facebook October 6, 2008 Comment (18)U.S. News has started working on the law school rankings that will be published at the end of March 2009. One of our goals with this edition is to produce our first-ever rankings of part-time J.D. programs. These programs enable many who can’t afford to attend law school full time to get a law degree and pursue successful legal careers. We believe that there’s a need to assess the relative merits of part-time J.D. programs because many prospective law students are trying to determine the best part-time program in their metropolitan area (or even nationally) in order to help them decide which law school they should attend.
According to the American Bar Association, around 10 percent of all first-year law students are enrolled part time at around 80 law schools. Part-time programs typically take four years to complete instead of three years for full-time ones.
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What Happened at the NACAC Convention
Tweet Share on Facebook September 30, 2008 Comment (3)The hottest issue at the National Association for College Admission Counseling's (NACAC) 2008 annual conference last week in Seattle was the future of standardized testing. This debate was triggered by the release of the Report of the NACAC Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission that made recommendations on how the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests should be used in college admissions. The session at the conference that discussed this report drew the largest crowd by far. The report itself stressed that colleges should use standardized tests responsibly and "that a 'one size fits all' approach for the use of standardized tests in undergraduate admission does not reflect the realities facing our nation's many and varied colleges and universities."
However, it remains to be seen what the outcome of this report will be because it was far more noteworthy for what it did not say. It did not call for colleges to abandon the use of the SAT and ACT test in admissions or push for more colleges to go "test optional," as many have recently. Many high school counselors had hoped that the NACAC report would be more forceful in criticizing the SAT and ACT tests. It was unclear whether any colleges that currently require either the SAT and ACT for admission will now become "test optional." In fact, the admission deans on the conference panel who were from schools that currently require the test—including Harvard University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Washington, and Georgetown University—implied they were unlikely to stop requiring the SAT or ACT in the immediate future.
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About That NACAC Report on the SAT
Tweet Share on Facebook September 22, 2008 Comment (4)The National Association for College Admission Counseling just released its long-awaited Report of the NACAC Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission that makes recommendations on how the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests should be used in college admissions.
Our use of SAT and ACT test scores in the America's Best Colleges rankings is one area that the commission—made up of college admissions deans and high school counselors—weighs in on. It says:
The Commission believes that, as tests designed to provide information about individuals to colleges and universities, the SAT and ACT were never designed as measures of the quality of an institution of higher education. Accordingly, the Commission encourages U.S. News to eliminate test scores as a measure of institutional quality.
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Which Colleges Offer the Most for Your Money?
Tweet Share on Facebook September 18, 2008 Comment (52)Assessing the educational quality of colleges relative to their costs is becoming a more difficult task, especially given the growing complexities of financial aid. Yet, with the cost of colleges increasing faster than most family incomes, value has become a key factor for students in selecting where to go to school.
To make it easier for families that qualify for financial aid to determine values, U.S. News has produced lists of the best college values in 10 academic categories. And because U.S News believes that the best values are found among schools that are above average educationally, only colleges in the top-half of their America's Best Colleges 2009 edition rankings category were considered for the evaluation.
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Rutgers Leads the Way in Ethnic Diversity
Tweet Share on Facebook September 9, 2008 Comment (13)Many people believe that an ethnically diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil. A school is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have around the same percentage of students enrolled. That means, if a school has one ethnic group that makes up a very large percentage of its student body, it's not very diverse, even though there may be other ethnic groups represented in small percentages on campus.
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Economic Diversity: Why We Measure It
Tweet Share on Facebook September 4, 2008 Comment (2)U.S. News has once again analyzed economic diversity at colleges. Economic diversity provides one insight into what the composition of the student body is actually like to students who are interested in applying. Economic diversity also continues to receive growing attention as a social issue in higher ed, particularly at some of the top schools that haven't traditionally enrolled large numbers of students from low-income families. It has been argued by many that colleges and universities should make a better effort to educate these students, given education's role in social mobility.
How is economic diversity determined? U.S. News looks at the percentage of enrolled undergraduate students receiving Pell grants at each school. Many experts say that the percentage of students receiving Pell grants is the best available gauge of how many low-income undergrads there are on a given campus. Pell grants are awarded from a federally funded program that gives need-based grants to low-income students and are most often given to undergrads with family incomes under $20,000.
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The Public University Rankings Are Here
Tweet Share on Facebook August 28, 2008 Comment (19)If you are interested in which are the best U.S. public colleges and universities, U.S. News has just posted the top-ranked public schools from the 2009 edition of America's Best Colleges. The public schools are ranked within our 10 categories. Go to the links below to see which colleges are the top-ranked publics.
Top Public Colleges and Universities
