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COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY RANKINGS

 

Links from this page to non-Coast Guard sites are provided as a customer service and do not represent any implicit or explicit endorsement by the United States Coast Guard of any commercial or private issues, products, or services presented there.

Every September, U.S. News & World Report publishes an issue which attempts to measure academic excellence at U.S. colleges and universities and to rank them accordingly.  To quote The Washington Monthly,

What U.S. News does to arrive at its results involves gauging things like average faculty salaries, for instance, or the level of praise for one college from the presidents of other colleges. Maybe that's not totally useless, but it's also a bit like assessing the quality of restaurants based on how much they spend on linen.... We believe that what colleges do matters not just to prospective applicants, but also to the rest of us. After all, America depends on its institutions of higher education for a variety of crucial public tasks: conducting the cutting-edge research that drives the economy; offering students from low-income families a path to a better life; and positively shaping the characters of the young people who will go on to lead the country. Government provides colleges and universities with billions of dollars in research grants, tax benefits, and student financial aid to achieve these goals. If parents and teachers deserve to know how well colleges are spending their tuition dollars, shouldn't average citizens also have a way of finding out how well schools are spending their tax dollars?

My rationale for including The Washington Monthly's alternative rankings is a belief that education – for one's children or oneself – shouldn't be an impulse purchase.  Just as most people would never buy a house or a car without doing a lot of comparison shopping and research, so it should be with higher education.  Unfortunately, much of the information widely available to the public is not all that helpful – assuming a quality education is what you're looking for rather than prestige or other criteria unrelated to the type and quality of education your children or you actually receive.

 

The Washington Monthly's College Guide 2007

• The Tyranny of Prestige

• A Different Kind of College Ranking

• America's Best Community Colleges: Why They're Better Than Some of the "Best" Four-Year Universities

• Built to Teach: What Your Alma Mater Could Learn from Cascadia Community College

• Inside the Higher Ed Lobby: Welcome to One Dupont Circle, Where Good Education-Reform Ideas Go to Die

• University rankings

• Liberal arts college rankings

• Methodology

The Washington Monthly's College Guide 2006

• Annual College Guide - Intro

• Is Our Students Learning?: The measurements elite colleges don’t want you to see

The Washington Monthly's College Guide 2005

• Other Guides Ask What Colleges Can Do for You; We Ask What Colleges are Doing for the Country

Also, below are links to a number of articles aimed at those attending or about to attend college and their parents.  They're from the November 2003, 2004, and 2005 issues of The Atlantic Monthly (one of the oldest and most respected magazines in the country, founded in 1857).

 

The Atlantic Monthly’s College 2005 section

• Does Meritocracy Work?  Not if society and colleges keep failing to distinguish between wealth and merit

• The Best Class Money Can Buy: The rise of the "enrollment manager" and the cutthroat quest for competitive advantage. The secret weapon: financial-aid leveraging

• Is There Life After Rankings? A report card from one college president, whose school now shuns the U.S. News ranking system—and has not only survived but thrived

• What Does College Teach?  It's time to put an end to "faith-based" acceptance of higher education's quality

The Atlantic Monthly’s College 2004 section

• The Big Picture: Our annual survey of the admissions landscape uncovered recent and upcoming changes to the process, growing concern about tuition increases, and serious questions about whether colleges are fulfilling their mission

• Who Needs Harvard? The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller

• Measure by Measure: A new effort to determine how well schools teach

• Independent Counsel: For private admissions consultants business is booming. But is their expensive expertise worth the cost?

• The Third Way: Liberal arts or a professional education? More and more students are choosing to combine elements of both. A leading proponent describes the emerging trend he calls "practice-oriented education"

The Atlantic Monthly’s College 2003 section

• Our First Annual College-Admissions Survey: "Calm Down!" the deans and counselors say. Herewith an exploration of the American college-admissions system

• The New College Chaos: College admissions officers say they now have many, many more applications than they know how to handle—and, often, less reliable information to help them decide which students to admit

• The Late-Decision Program: Most people have heard of early-decision programs. But there's also a little-known safety net at the other end of the process, to catch those who don't get in anywhere

• What Makes a College Good?  A new survey seeks to get behind the well-publicized—and much criticized—college rankings and measure schools by how good a job they do of actually educating their students

• The Selectivity Illusion: Look at the data closely, and the neat hierarchy of selectivity begins to fall apart

• The Bias Question: In a surprising challenge to the SAT's reputation as an unbiased measure of student learning, one researcher has argued that blacks do better than matched-ability whites on the harder questions of the SAT—something he believes their scores should reflect

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