College Rankings: The Other Side of Best

At the start of each fall semester, prominent periodicals provide rankings of the best colleges and universities.  They examine the quality of colleges within universities, for example, engineering versus business, and they even drill down to the discipline level, ranking of various departments from accounting to zoology.  The most common examples are U.S. News and World Report or Washington Monthly, which produce very detailed rankings of colleges and universities across the country.

However, what you don’t see on the newsstands is the rankings of the worst colleges.  Only recently, the Washington Monthly examined 1,700 four-year colleges and universities and used a different rankings methodology to identify the twenty worst colleges in America.   They produced 4 different lists of the worst colleges based on selected criteria.

The first list of worst colleges was based on four criteria.  They examined: 1. The net price, which they defined as tuition minus grants and scholarships; 2. The high average student debt, which is the amount of money students borrowed to attend; 3. The high cohort loan default rate, a federal measure that tracks the percentage of each college’s freshman class that defaults on their student loans within three years of beginning to repay them;, and 4.  The low graduation rates.  Not surprisingly, the list of the 20 worst colleges was made up of all private colleges, of which 11 were for-profit and nine were non-profit schools and included two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s).  There were no public universities on this list.  I don’t want to point fingers at these colleges, so I  won’t identify them.

The second list was based solely on low graduation rates.  It used two criteria to measure completion of the bachelor’s degree.  The first was the bachelor’s degree graduation rate and the second was the number of degrees awarded for every 100 full-time equivalent students.  While not providing a detailed explanation, the Washington Monthly also, factored into this ranking a college’s borrowing rate and gave it equal weight to the cohort loan default rate, the median borrowing amount, and the net price.  Like the first list, all of the colleges on this worst list were private,  12 were for-profit and eight were non-profit.  Four of the schools on this list were HBCU’s and none were public institutions.  Four schools appeared on both lists.

The third list examined each college’s debt in relation to its borrowing rate.  This list also included part-time students by counting the ratio of degrees awarded per 100 full-time equivalent students, thus including all students whether full- or part-time.  Sadly, of the  20 colleges on this list,  12 were HBCU’s and two of these schools are public universities.  Of the remaining  18 schools,  10 were private non-profit and the other eight were private for-profit colleges.  While this does not speak well for HBCU’s, it must be noted that HBCU’s have historically provided a college education to African Americans when there were refused admission to other colleges and universities.  And until recently, all of the students attending HBCU’s were first-generation and low income.

The final list of worst colleges took into account graduation rates, but adjusted by the percent of minority and low-income students it enrolled and graduated.  Low-income was defined as the number of students who received Pell Grants.  The list also considered the net price of attendance for the Pell Grant recipients.  Using these criteria, the list was very different compared to the previous three lists.  None of the schools in this list were HBCU’s.  However, the list was made up of small and expensive private non-profit colleges.  Only five of the schools were private for-profit.

As you can see  by  the different variables used to produce the above four lists, creating a list of the worst, or for that matter best, colleges, requires making judgments that can have adverse effects on those colleges.  And the judgments we make does not mean that all colleges are equal and judged equally.  A college that enrolls 90% low-income, first-generation, minority students is not the same as a highly selective, private, expensive Ivy League school.

Recently, the Obama administration set out to devise a college rating system that would treat each college and university fairly.  They quickly found out that minority serving institutions (HBCU, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Native-American Serving Institutions, etc.) could not be rated with the same criteria as the typical university.  At stake would be the loss of federal funding for financial aid and other programs, $200 billion to be exact.  As you can imagine, college and university presidents are opposed to the idea.  Their key argument is that institutions of higher education are extremely diverse with very different missions, costs and students.

I am writing about this subject not to belittle the colleges on these lists, but to bring to the forefront a major problem that exists in America.  We can’t treat all colleges equally, because they are not all created equal.  We must look at ways to help minority serving institutions be more successful.  We must do research to determine what factors aid minority students at succeeding in college.  We must examine those colleges who have high success rates with minority students and determine what they are doing right.  We must then disseminate the best practices to all the colleges that serve minority students and provide incentives so that they adopt the best practices.  These are the schools who are educating the future workforce, the future leaders of America.  We must ensure that they are successful.