Rating Colleges by Their Contribution to the Social Good

By Tamar Lewin
Cover of Washington Monthly Magazine, September 2009 issue.Washington Monthly

Washington Monthly magazine came out with its own college rankings today, naming the nation’s “best’’ colleges from a very different vantage point from that of U.S. News and World Report.

The Washington Monthly ratings try to measure which colleges do the most for the social good, by improving social mobility, producing research and promoting service.

The magazine’s College Guide Web site, looks at different indicators than most other ranking systems: the percentage of students getting Pell grants and their graduation rates, the institution’s research spending, its record of B.A. recipients going on to get Ph.D’s or going into the Peace Corps or R.O.T.C., and what percentage of federal work-study funds the institution spends on service.

By those lights, the top three universities in the nation are all part of the University of California system: Berkeley, San Diego and U.C.L.A. Thirteen of the top 20 national universities are public, while Harvard comes in at number 11, Yale at 23 and Princeton at 28. (In the U.S. News rankings, none of the top 20 national universities are public.)

Among the liberal arts colleges, most of the top 10 — Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Williams, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Carleton and Wellesley — are among the leading colleges in the U.S. News lists, too.

Women’s colleges are standouts by the Washington Monthly criteria, with four among the top 10. And historically black institutions do far better than they do on the U.S. News rankings.

The U.S. News & World Report rankings, the leader in the field and the one everyone loves to hate, are probably the best measure of a university’s prestige — so much so that some college presidents earn bonuses for getting their school to rise on the lists.

The U.S. News rankings have been widely criticized for giving greatest weight to a peer-assessment survey. And the critiques heated up after this spring’s revelations that Clemson University’s president rated his own university the best in the nation, ahead of the Ivies, and the University of Florida’s president rated his own as equal to the Ivies, and far better than all the state’s other institutions.

At a time when higher education is getting unprecedented attention — and tuition is reaching unprecedented heights — college rankings have become a growth industry, both in the United States and around the world. Each ranking system uses different criteria.

Forbes introduced its rankings last year, taking into account such factors as alumni listings in Who’s Who, and student evaluations of professors on Ratemyprofessors.com.

With the rapid globalization of higher education, the international rankings by the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education and China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University now attract a wide following.

The Washington Monthly rankings, looking at the indicators of colleges’ social utility, are a different kind of effort, and an interesting one.

What would the world be like if college presidents worked as hard to improve their Washington Monthly rankings as they now do to keep up their U.S. News ranking?

Comments are no longer being accepted.

James September 2, 2009 · 10:40 am

First you have to define what “social good” is. It is one of those fuzzy liberal feel-good terms that can mean anything its user wants it to mean in order to suit their argument. Second, the purpose of a college or university is to educate its students and conduct research.

Lee Nutini September 2, 2009 · 12:12 pm

James (1),

I think we can all agree that your first point is a good one, however, your second point is not only unbelievably vague, but it has often detracted from the college’s ability to truly “educate its students”.

-Lee

Andy September 2, 2009 · 12:24 pm

James — if you need to be told what a good citizen is, chances are you did not attend one of those “fuzzy, liberal, feel-good” schools. In fact, you might even be an investment banker….

Tony September 2, 2009 · 12:24 pm

Quite frankly college rankings are a bunch of baloney – there is only one way to rank a college, compare how much a student knows when he comes out of the college compared to how much he knew when he went in. Everything else is bunk. Harvard ranks high, not because it is a good school but because it can be exclusive based on its perceived reputation. What they should be ranked on is how much NEW knowledge they squeezed into an 18 year old’s head. What knowledge that student arrived with, or how good a job he got when he got out is irrelevant. If your daddy is president of the United States you’ll get a good job when you graduate, even if you’re an idiot. Don’t confuse reputation with quality. Most of the heads of the Fortune 500 companies did not go to Ivy schools.

maris September 2, 2009 · 12:25 pm

Anything which serves to diminish the exaggerated importance of the USNews survey is a good thing.

Don September 2, 2009 · 12:28 pm

All of these surveys are incredibly stupid and flawed. For example, the University of Michigan ranks considerably lower than it should because of certain criteria that should not be a part of the equation (acceptance ratios, etc.). But if one were to take a survey of college age kids about where they would want to go to school, Michigan would rank rather high. The only things that should matter are academic ranking and campus environment.

piotr September 2, 2009 · 12:28 pm

The Times Higher Education ranks Brown, Duke, McGill and U. of Manchester ahead of Berkeley – how can anybody takes this even half-seriously???

blert September 2, 2009 · 12:36 pm

Washington Monthly’s rankings seem imperfect to me at best, perhaps as much or more so than U.S. News’ rankings, which are also imperfect at best. Defining social good is a slippery task, and picking out a few national and international “social good” programs on which to base rankings overlooks a lot of university-specific programs that send teams to do work through local, regional, national, and international programs. But because the program may be entirely organized through that specific university, it may never show up in a rankings scheme.

For that matter, Forbes’ ranking system is a joke. Basing rankings on Who’s Who, which is a for-profit scam that most smart students steer away from, and ratemyprofessors.com, which is an extremely unscientific internet poll in which people can create multiple accounts to rank multiple times, and even rank themselves, and which awards attractive teachers chili peppers to denote hotness, is even worse as a basis for rankings.

For example, I know one person who got slammed by a student on ratemyprofessors.com because that student had entirely plagiarized a final paper in a writing course, and thus received a failing grade. The student faced university academic discipline and was entirely at fault, but took revenge with bad rankings on ratemyprofessors.com. With only half a dozen people or so ranking each professor, that one person’s votes hold a lot of sway, but is there any recourse for this? No.

Ranking systems are fine as long as a person understands how the rankings are formulated and believes valuable what the rankings try to measure. Washington Monthly’s rankings will appeal to a narrow band of liberal activist students and parents, while most others will likely ignore this ranking. U.S. News inspires a lot fewer warm, fuzzy feelings, and it’s hard to put a lot of credibility in what university administrators think of other universities as a measure of the value of an education given that those administrators often know very little about the universities they rank, but at least these rankings will continue to have broader appeal.

tmelvin September 2, 2009 · 12:37 pm

Noone will pay attention to this ranking scheme.

W.ReedMoran September 2, 2009 · 12:48 pm

We define “social good” in many (ill-conceived) ways, not the least of which is broader access to personal power, wealth, status, and fame.

If “social mobility” is the American Dream, but is equated with the unspoken value of education in “getting ahead in life,” we are doomed.

I teach part-time at a public university where intellectual rigor is what is lacking in the students’ experience, not compassion nor idealism.

In contrast, I am continually appalled by the crimes and hubris of many my “privileged” classmates from the “top” schools on any published list.

Intellectual rigor only leads to our internal definition of the “social good,” and then it is up to each of us to live by those
insights.

Schools that define success of their education by means of the consumer power or celebrity quotient of their graduates produce graduates with those values etched into their calcified hearts.

John September 2, 2009 · 12:50 pm

Read the news stories about the massive cuts to California higher education in this year’s budget. Class sizes are soaring and staff (including faculty) are being furloughed, even at darlings like Berkeley and UCLA. If the UC schools don’t fall in next year’s rankings, then you can safely assume that those rankings aren’t paying attention to reality.

Will US News et al. dare to take Berkeley down a peg due to real budgetary conditions–cuts that deep are certain to affect the quality of education at those schools–or are they really just measuring “reputation” and conventional wisdom? We’ll see….

$ September 2, 2009 · 1:00 pm

The #1 school attended by Fortune 500 CEOs is CUNY – City College….

google it

Been There, Done That September 2, 2009 · 1:02 pm

My son applied to Harvard, Stanford and UCLA last year. He didn’t have perfect grades, but he did have something very few kids have – a gold medal from science competitions for 3 years of independent research, including simulations he designed and wrote, examining the impact of global climate change on the California wetlands, plus under his belt doing his first scientific presentations (as a co-author) at a *real* science conference (they were the youngest presenters there *ever*).

How did this impact the application process? Well, Stanford did not care at all – there was no way to submit independent research. All you had was a bunch of weird social questions about “what kind of roommate are you?” and “what do you think of video games?”.

Harvard had a section to submit an example of unusual research or art. He chose to submit one of the papers documenting the simulations. He’s still not sure if anyone ever looked at it.

UCLA had a section to submit an example of unusual research or art. He also chose to submit one of the papers documenting the simulations. He heard back from UCLA shortly afterward, asking for more documentation on how he did the research, to which he responded.

Guess which university he’s attending right now? Yes, UCLA. He felt it was the only university that cared about his research interests.

Three cheers to the University of California. It’s time the “social” schools get exposed for what they are – social climbing engines which teach the students to take much from our society and give little back. Don’t we have enough pirates by now?

eriko September 2, 2009 · 1:20 pm

James,

I agree that the term “social good” can be highly subjective, but conservative paranoia doesn’t really belong in this conversation. Did you notice in Lewin’s essay that student participation in the Peace Corp and R.O.T.C. are both taken into consideration by Washington Monthly?

Let’s use a little common sense when it comes to identifying what is “socially good”. It’s amazing to me how social responsibility is so often mocked or ridiculed by people on the right as “fuzzy” or “feel-good.”

The folks at Washington Monthly are probably genuinely interested in offering families an alternative to the U.S. News junta that favors name recognition and prestige over everything else, and more power to them.

Interestingly, they fail to identify the most effective agents for “social good” in our country’s public/private educational system- America’s community colleges. Year-in-and-year-out they produce legions of professionals dedicated to improving our country’s government, criminal justice system, health-care system, educational system, social welfare system, etc., etc., etc.

Justin September 2, 2009 · 3:12 pm

This is great! Sort of like the bigger survey done of 150 business schools by the Aspen Institute, Beyond Grey Pinstripes, which ranks MBA programs based on the level of social and environmental content in their curriculum. Their website is //www.BeyondGreyPinstripes.org. Let’s hope both these rankings take off and become meaningful resources for prospective students!

ew September 3, 2009 · 2:40 pm

Weird that they include ROTC service and that they don’t include Teach for America.

Bill September 3, 2009 · 3:39 pm

Sure ranking systems are always imperfect, but I welcome this fresh approach. This one on its surface seems no more or less arbitrary than any of the others. More comparative ranking systems are better than less. Take them all with a gigantic lump of salt. Their greatest value is perhaps to encourage a student to take a deeper look at a school they might not otherwise have investigated.

i find it interesting, for example, that some institutions with very high sticker prices did quite well in a poll that examines the number of Pell grant recipients and their success rate. Perhaps the Swarthmore’s of the world are making real differences in the lives of talented but underprivileged young people by setting their sticker price very high, but striving to meet the full need of every student they accept, regardless of income.

Moho gal September 5, 2009 · 12:24 am

Applying to colleges a few years ago, I thought how high I got up the US News and Rankings report would determine my life. Its a common feeling, most students know the rankings by heart, or at least if their school is better than another’s. This list, though not perfect because like someone else mentioned, it fails to mention Teach for America, which is the top employer for many of the institutions listed, like UC Berkeley, Mount Holyoke and Harvard. But it gives an idea of what a student’s life might be like after college. Which is longer and more important than the four years spent at any of these places.

David Benjamin September 5, 2009 · 7:57 pm

It is interesting that this column focuses almost entirely on the liberal arts and humanities – including English where professors may want to do some research but find external funding difficult or impossible. This is not due to their lack of ability nor to their ability to transfer the information from the research to the student in the classroom.

Where your argument about research by faculty and teaching falls apart is that few colleges fund research by science faculty. It has been a tradition, and is almost totally required in the biological and physical sciences, that the faculty raise their own funds from external sources and, indeed, their own salaries for the portion of their time spent on that research. In fact, promotion and tenure demand they do raise these funds which not only pay for their salaries but for graduate student, and some undergraduate student, stipends, all supplies, and overhead which amortizes the construction of their labs in addition to the cost of running those labs, i.e., janitorial, utilities, administration etc.

It remains a fact that University support of research in the liberal arts and humanities is far different than funding of research in the sciences.

EL September 7, 2009 · 7:48 pm

Everyone knows that the U.S. News rankings have some problems and it should go without saying that they shouldn’t be taken as gospel. That said, rankings are important to the field of academia and, in turn, to students and parents. Too often, people seem to dismiss the idea of a truly *fine* education – that is, one that broadens students perspectives, challenges them to think critically and creatively, and pushes them to new intellectual horizons. Rankings attempt to capture this, but leave us wanting.

Given the captive audience of future students, as well as their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors, I am extremely concerned that a widely trusted media source like Forbes would utilize something as flagrantly unregulated as ratemyprofessor.com. To put it bluntly, this flies in the face of any ethical approach to quantitative analysis (and what is the goal of a rating system if not to quantify?). Anyone can hop on ratemyprofessor.com, pick a prof at random, and say whatever they choose *without* any mechanism to check whether he/she was ever taught by the prof, took the course in question, completed previous ratings about the same prof, etc. In short, the whole site is utterly unreliable and prone to the whims of a particular set of students, namely those with enough spare time to get online and rate things like a professor’s “Hotness”. And let’s not forget that one key criteria for the prof’s overall rating is the difficulty level of the course. Has Forbes really sunk so low as to penalize respected academics for wanting to challenge their students and, god forbid, not doing it in a miniskirt??

Cathy September 9, 2009 · 9:39 am

To follow on ew’s comment in #16 — not Teach for America, not Jesuit Volunteer Corps, not Jesuit Volunteer International… Just using the Peace Corps seems like a poor way of evaluating service.

A September 9, 2009 · 2:05 pm

I find the sour grapes from those who didn’t match up to the CA public universities to be pungent offal from eastern breezes. Berkeley gets more done with less than any university in the country, and UCSD is one of the premier science institutions in the states. And oh yeah, my daughter goes to UCSD and my son is going to Berkeley.

Read Been There Done That, no.13.

College Girl September 15, 2009 · 12:02 am

Full disclosure–I went to both Berkeley and Harvard. I learned so much at each place. I would say, however, that my professors at Berkeley were, overall, much more excited about teaching. I had some of the foremost scholars in their fields, who also happened to care about me as an undergrad. These people had already made and were making AMAZING contributions in their fields.

While I went to grad school at Harvard, I can say with certainty that the undergrads there are not treated so well. They often don’t have access to the most esteemed professors, who tend to only teach the grad students (unlike at Berkeley). The undergraduates constantly complain about this.

At Berkeley, there is a campus wide focus on good teaching. There is an annual distinguished teaching award and professors want that title by their name. Students look for the accompanying asterik as they choose their courses. At Harvard, professors often complain that they are looked down upon by their peers if they spend too much time on students. The implication is that they must be slacking on research. Why isn’t there a culture of both, I wonder?

I like the cache of my Harvard degree, and I had some very outstanding professors, and great opportunities. But I must say (as mentioned several times by others) that Berkeley seems to do much more with less. I cannot imagine a better college experience for the mind, body (great athletic facilities and programs), and soul. The facilities actually surpass Harvard’s, as did the happiness on the campus. Yes, I hobnobbed with more famous people at Harvard, but if asked, I would pick Berkeley every time (though I loved my Harvard experience). I agree that US News would do well to look a little bit less at money factors.

From my personal vantage point, I can attest to Berkeley students giving back through scholarship and service. Nearly all of my classmates who I know of went to grad school (quite a few to Harvard, actually), and most are in some type of public service now. I’ve worked in many different fields, but fell in love with teaching in a low income public school. Berkeley gave me much, and I want to give back to others.

Go Bears.

David Wyles October 2, 2009 · 8:42 pm

I went to Yale in the sixties (on a full scholarship) and I must say, I had some of the greatest teachers and minds in the country teaching me. (For instance, I had Harold Bloom teaching me in a freshman English class — it doesn’t get much better than that.) I will be eternally grateful for the wonderful, inspiring professors at Yale (the best taught as well as wrote books). After graduation, I went to Oxford (again on a scholarship), but there you had to seek out dons who would really work with you. Some brilliant, some not so. Then I went to grad school at UCLA (in film). Had some great teahers again, like Jean Renoir and Josef von Sternberg, but the academic level at UCLA was way below that of Yale or Oxford. I had some of the best times of my life at UCLA, but that was mainly due to the copious sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. (The “Doors” were our “house band” and played at our film school parties.)

UCLA is a great institution (and gives a lot of minorities a chance), but there is no way that an education there compares to Yale. For undergraduate education, Yale was and still is the best. (Sorry, but Harvard and its professors don’t pay as much attention to the undergraduates — and that’s why I chose to go to Yale.)

P.S. When I was at Yale, I was a senior editor of the Yale Daily News and I’m proud to say that I wrote the first editorial calling for co-education — it happened a few years later and I’m so happy that it finally did. I doubt that I was personally responsible for that, but I’m definitely happy that I was ahead of the curve.