Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Queens College ranked second in a list, compiled by Washington Monthly, of colleges that offered the “best bang for the buck."
By ARIEL KAMINER
Published: October 27, 2013 257 Comments
Looking out over the quadrangle before him as students dashed from one
class to the next, James Muyskens was feeling proud one recent
afternoon, and why not?
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The college he had led for the past 11 years had just been awarded
second place in a new ranking of American higher education — ahead of
flagship state universities, ahead of elite liberal arts colleges, even
ahead of all eight Ivy League universities.
The college is Queens College, a part of the City University of New York with an annual tuition of $5,730, and a view of the Long Island Expressway.
Catering to working-class students, more than half of whom were born in
other countries, Queens does not typically find itself at the top of
national rankings. Then again, this was not a typical ranking. It was a
list of colleges that offer the “best bang for the buck.”
“Elation,” said Dr. Muyskens, recalling his delight when he learned of the honor. “Thrilled!”
Purists might regard such bottom-line calculations as an insult to the
intellectual, social and civic value of education. But dollars-and-cents
tabulations like that one (which was compiled by Washington Monthly),
are the fastest-growing sector of the college rankings industry, with
ever more analyses vying for the attention of high school students and
their parents who are anxious about finances.
President Obama sharply raised the ante in August with a plan
to rate colleges on their value and affordability and to tie those
ratings to the $150 billion in financial aid that the federal government
supplies each year. Should Mr. Obama’s plan come to pass, value would
not just be a selling point for colleges, it would be a matter of life
and death.
But there is no agreement on how to measure the value of a college, and
there is no agreement, or anything even close, on what value is in the
first place.
“It’s a quest for the holy grail,” said Judith Scott-Clayton,
a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s
Teachers College. “It sounds good, it sounds like something we’d love to
know, to be able to rank the value of these institutions, but when it
comes down to practicalities, it’s very, very difficult.”
U.S. News and World Report, whose academic rankings have long been
derided — and obsessively followed — by college presidents, now
publishes “best value” lists as well.
Princeton Review, which has advised decades of prospective students on the best party schools, more recently began listing the best value schools, too.
Forbes Magazine got in the is-it-worth-the-money game too, as did, among
others, The Wall Street Journal, The Alumni Factor, Kiplinger’s
Personal Finance and Payscale, a company that gathers data about the job market.
Some of these analyses approach value as largely a function of cost: How
much is tuition? What subsidies are available? Others define it as
return on investment: How much do graduates earn? Some factor in student
satisfaction or academic ranking or graduation rates or economic
diversity, all in varying quantities.
These widely divergent definitions produce wildly divergent results.
Queens College did splendidly in a list that emphasizes social mobility
and civic virtue. Another New York City public college, Baruch, took
third place; No. 1 was Amherst.
But on a ranking that emphasizes alumni salaries, like Payscale’s list
of Colleges Worth Your Investment, Queens comes in 341st. The top spot
there goes to Harvey Mudd College,
in Claremont, Calif., which has a much higher tuition, but whose
graduates disproportionately enter lucrative fields like science and
engineering. The top tier of U.S. News’s list somehow features Harvard,
Princeton, Williams — and Soka University of America, a tiny Buddhist college in Southern California that admitted its first undergraduates in 2001.
Forbes’s most recent list starts out with the five national service
academies, which charge no tuition. And when the Education Trust, an
advocacy group, set out to list the colleges that do right by low-income
students, it found only five entries, including Queens.
As for the federal government, no one yet knows how it will perform its
evaluation. Arne Duncan, the education secretary, has said that his goal
is a ratings system, not a single first-place-to-last-place ranking,
and that the ratings will compare only schools that are similar in their
mission, their student population and so on. Harvard and Yale, that is;
not Harvard and Soka University of America.
“We’ll be looking at access,” Mr. Duncan said in a recent speech, “such
as the percentage of students receiving Pell grants. We’ll be looking at
affordability, like average tuition, scholarships and loan debt. And
we’ll be looking at outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates,
alumni satisfaction surveys, graduate earnings and the advanced degrees
of college graduates.”
In search of the best way to measure those categories, and of other
kinds of information that ought to be included, Education Department
officials will soon fan out across the country for months of town hall
meetings, school forums and interviews. The plan is to compile the
ratings by the start of the 2015-16 school year and to link those
ratings to federal aid by 2018.
But Carolyn Hoxby, a Stanford professor and an author of an influential study about the failures of college as an engine for social mobility, said the effort is doomed to fail.
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