President Obama made headlines in the higher education world last week with a series of speeches about possible federal plans designed to bring down the cost of college. While the President made several interesting points (such as cutting law school from three to two years), the most interesting proposal to me was has plan to create a series of federal ratings based on whether colleges provide “good value” to students—tying funding to those ratings.
How could those ratings be constructed? As noted by Libby Nelson in Politico, the federal government plans to publish currently collected data on the net price of attendance (what students pay after taking grant aid into account), average borrowing amounts, and enrollment of Pell Grant recipients. Other measures could potentially be included, some of which are already collected but not readily available (graduation rates for Pell recipients) and others which would be brand new (let your imagination run wild).
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my work with Washington Monthly magazine’s annual set of college rankings. Last year was my first year as the consulting methodologist, meaning that I collected the data underlying the rankings, compiled it, and created the rankings—including a new measure of cost-adjusted graduation rate performance. This measure seeks to reward colleges which do a good job serving and graduating students from modest economic means, a far cry from many prestige-based rankings.
The metrics in the Washington Monthly rankings are at least somewhat similar to those proposed by President Obama in his speeches. As a result, we bumped up the release of the new 2013 “bang for the buck” rankings to Thursday afternoon. These rankings reward colleges which performed well on four different metrics:
- Have a graduation rate of at least 50%.
- Match or exceed their predicted graduation rate given student and institutional characteristics.
- Have at least 20% of students receive Pell Grants (a measure of effort in enrolling low-income students).
- Have a three-year student loan default rate of less than 10%.
Only one in five four-year colleges in America met all four of those criteria, which highlighted a different group of colleges than is normally highlighted. Colleges such as CUNY Baruch College and Cal State University-Fullerton ranked well, while most Ivy League institutions failed to make the list due to Pell Grant enrollment rates in the teens.
This work caught the eye of the media, as I was asked to be on MSNBC’s “All in with Chris Hayes” on Friday night to discuss the rankings and their policy implications. Here is a link to the full segment, where I’m on with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and well-known author Anna Kamenetz:
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/52832257/
This was a fun experience, and now I can put the “As Seen on TV” label on my CV. (Right?) Seriously, though, stay tuned for the full Washington Monthly rankings coming out in the morning!
Robert Kelchen 