Can We Measure the Value of College Teaching?
…of Economics at Centre College and author of The College Cost Disease: Higher Cost and Lower Quality, forthcoming from Edward Elgar, Ltd. Andrew Gillen is the Research Director at the…
Search Results for: college rankings
Why Caltech Is in a Class by Itself
…elite colleges and universities in the U.S. (median admit) has a substantially lower achievement record in terms of high school grades and SAT scores, not only than his white and…
What Is Texas A&M up to?
…the same vein, the political forces for greater accountability have recently been targeting college and university faculty members as the main culprits of educational waste and excessive college costs. While…
Don’t Pay Sticker Price, Part 2—the National Universities
…average net prices among the top 10 liberal arts colleges in 2008. Students at Carleton College, on average, paid the highest net price among these 10 colleges, more than $25,000…
Don’t Pay Sticker Price for College
…Since colleges compete with other institutions for prestige and high rankings in college guides such as U.S. News & World Report, the strategic use of tuition discounts – if the…
The Underperformance Problem
…problem.” Once in college blacks with the same entering SAT scores as whites and Asians earn substantially lower grades over their college careers and wind up with substantially lower class…
Not Just Another College Ranking
Forbes has issued its 3rd annual College Rankings, delivering its crown to Williams College. Comparison to the U.S. News and World Report list is inevitable so let’s not delay in…
The Quiet Preference for Men in Admissions
…co-educational school where the number of students of each sex is roughly equal. There are almost no all-men’s colleges left in the United States, and only around 50 all-women’s colleges…
The Achilles Heel of the U.S. News Rankings
…So U.S. News sent surveys to college presidents around the country asking them to pick ten colleges that provided the best undergraduate education in their particular academic niche. The magazine…
Are You an ”Exclusive Scholar”? Just Sign Here
…freshman slots to fill, is an effort to game the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, which are in part based on “selectivity” (the ratio of admissions to applications)…
Does U.S. News Make Law Schools More Expensive?
…law school deans, who face competitive pressures from other law schools, have blamed the U.S. News and World Report rankings of law schools. These critics believe the rankings spark a…
The Rankings Go Global
…the side of consumers with products such as my own Fiske Guide to College and, of course, the U.S. News rankings. It was the colleges that first sent out the…
Gaming The College Rankings
…the system to their own advantages, colleges responded in kind. The most obvious examples of gaming are efforts to increase colleges’ standing on the U.S. News rankings lists. Years ago…
Ranking Colleges By ”Economic Diversity”
In an effort to show which colleges are reaching out to low-income students, U.S. News & World Report has published “economic diversity” rankings of American colleges and universities. That sounds…
Worth A Look
The latest installment of the Washington Monthly college rankings is out. Their ranking evaluates such factors as the percentage of students entering ROTC or the peace corps, awards won by…
The Ominous Rise Of The Adjuncts
…prestigious, less wealthy schools. One suspects that at many colleges, public universities, and community colleges, the rise in adjunct teachers is a lot less tied to the rankings game and…
When Campuses Became Dysfunctional
In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant…
The End Of Merit-Based Admission
Students applying for college admission now face a new reality—the SAT is increasingly optional at our colleges and universities. The test-optional movement, pioneered by FairTest, a political advocacy group supported…
The Campus And The Nanny State
…principals to hire a graduate of a college of education to teach young children, something that might actually improve student preparation for college?). The decline in adult literacy of college…
Happy Holidays
Happy holidays to our readers. We’d encourage you to catch up on material from recent months: Wondering how to read College rankings? – When College Rankings Are A Marketing Ploy…
When College Rankings Are A Marketing Ploy
…U.S. News & World Report college rankings? Here’s what I tell them. First, understand the real agenda of college rankings. The main reason that U.S. News compiles and publishes rankings…
Who’s Acing The GREs?
…may be work. Whatever the reason, the Roessler rankings suggest that, if GRE scores are a valid measure of intellectual aptitude, the brightest college graduates are getting their Ph.D.’s in…
Downgrading SATs Makes Sense
…of the actual performance criteria that most American business enterprises are judged by — the current college rankings paradigm says, in essence, that you’re a good college because you’ve admitted…
College Green? Bah Humbug.
The term “College Green” has a whole new meaning these days. No longer does it refer to the tree-lined verdant lawn at the heart of the classic college campus. It…
Can We Change The Campus Culture?
…to feel comfortable during their college years. When the ever-shrinking vanguard of lawyers and others protective of academic freedom pointed out that colleges were inappropriate locales for speech codes, the…
What Is It About The Liberal Arts?
…of judging the college’s well-being revolve around the size of the endowment and the college’s rankings in the annual educational issue of US News and World Report. One trustee comes…
The Long Shadow Of The Sixties
In every discussion of left-wing bias on college campuses, a good portion of faculty defenders come to the table with a blunt contention. There is NO bias, they insist. Sure,…
Tired Of Overly Broad College Rankings?
I certainly am. Those with narrower interests will be well-served by Popular Science’s recent “A Geek’s Guide to College.” What do you want to do in college? Shoot Particles? Try…
Fuzzy Admissions At UCLA
…have attended college, not been faced with language problems and come from households with higher incomes. Thus, while the black students in the admission pool have typically lower academic achievement,…
Abandoning The SAT: Why?
…news reports about the colleges and universities, many with top rankings, that are abandoning the SAT and its rival test, the ACT, in droves. Just a few days ago, Wake…