Although high school students applying to colleges invariably rely on college ranking guides as a primary source of information, these guides are often misleading and, in most cases, counterproductive. Frederick Hess and Faryn Hochleitner at the American Enterprise Institute (College Rankings Inflation: Are You Overpaying for Prestige) AEI, 5/24/12 contend “the ranks of the top […]
Read More
By Evan Sparks, from Philanthropy magazine Scan the rankings of the world’s best universities and you may spot a few patterns. First, you will probably notice that, in every major survey, virtually all of the world’s 20 best schools are located in English-speaking countries. Next, within this elite cohort, it is hard to […]
Read More
It may be inevitable: “gainful employment” rules for law schools. “Gainful employment” is a term of art coined in the wake of the U.S. Education Department’s regulations last June governing for-profit colleges and similar vocational institutions from which many students emerge with student-loan debt and few prospects for working at jobs they were trained for. […]
Read More
————————————- Read Part 1 here. ————————————- In examining the gulf between sticker price and real cost, let’s consider the top 10 national universities as defined by U.S. News & World Report in its most recent rankings. Using U. S. Department of Education data, I compiled the average net prices that students from different family income […]
Read More
The National Research Council has finally issued its rankings of doctoral programs, with coverage appearing here, here, and here . Right now, everybody is trying to assimilate the results, which are more complicated than those in the 1995 report. The “Data-Based Assessment” runs to 282 pages, the “Guide to the Methodology” 57 pages, and each […]
Read More
In 1983 U.S. News & World Report came up with what Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at the magazine, described as “a journalistic parlor game.” The magazine had just conducted a successful survey of U.S. leaders to identify the most influential Americans. Why not, the editors asked, use a similar approach to identify the […]
Read More
By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola Why do law schools charge higher and higher tuitions that keep outrunning the cost of living? In the two decades ending in 2007, according to the American Bar Association, the cost of attending the average private law school (including tuition and fees) more than tripled–increasing from $8,911 […]
Read More
The Times Higher Education Supplement has now come out with its sixth annual listing of the world’s top universities. Harvard continues to top the list, followed by the denizen of that other Cambridge across the Pond, which has now edged out Yale. The big news this year: the number of North American universities in the […]
Read More
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 by Edward Fiske. About the collapse of endowments? Ivy-Covered Hedge Funds by Joe Malchow Looking for current arguments in the SAT debate? Downgrading SATs Makes […]
Read More
1. Several colleges have refused to return the U.S. News surveys asking colleges for opinions of their peers. The obvious question is why “peer review surveys” on an institutional level were ever regarded as helpful? It’s one thing to ask a philosophy department for their opinion of their peers, but a whole university? The level […]
Read More