Volatility Sells

Volatility sells - at least the US News special issue on college rankings. That's the message of an old (1999) article in Slate I recently stumbled upon on the Internet, and it makes a lot of sense. If rankings changed little from one year to another, parents would not worry they're missing out on important information, and would use old rankings for all their children as the latter decide where to apply to college, which would negatively affect US News profits. The reason why the magazine fudges with its ranking criteria so much isn't due to some epiphany regarding what makes a good college education (followed the next year by another epiphany, and so on), but to introduce suspense every year, and turn administrators into ranking addicts - if people could be sure of their college's rank, they would soon lose interest; instead, the slightest move down triggers mass hysteria, and any move up is cause for celebration.

This was illustrated particularly vividly in the rankings published in August 1999, because Caltech jumped from No. 9 to No. 1 in just one year. The article's author, Bruce Gottlieb, explains, after poking holes into US News's weak attempt to portray the rise as perfectly legitimate: "The real reason Caltech jumped eight spaces this year is that the editors at US News fiddled with the rules." The discussion between Gottlieb and US News' statistical guru on whether the previous year's rankings were inferior (and whether US News should apologize to the students who selected a college based on this "poor" information) is hilarious. The trick that allowed Caltech to come out on top that year was a change in the way educational expenditures per student are taken into account. This item skews the results in favor of universities with strong engineering and medical programs, as those require a lot of equipment. Until 1999, "US News considered only a school's ranking in this category". In 1999, "universities [were] allowed to count their research budgets in their per-student expenditures, though students get no direct benefit from costly research their professors are doing outside of class." (I'll venture, though, that many professors enlist undergraduate students to help them in their endeavors by providing them with valuable research experience, either for course credit or using the National Science Foundation's REU program, but maybe the trend was not as pronounced in the late 1990s. On the other hand, you do not need expensive equipment to major in finance or accounting, and taking into account the dollar amount of research expenditures overshadows the quality of these programs.)

Gottlieb suggests one of the difficulties inherent to ranking colleges is that there is no way to check the validity of the rankings. In sports, you can see who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl, and compare the teams' rankings at the beginning of the season with the end results. Of course, salaries of recent graduates should help shed some light on that matter, but how do you compare a salary in a small town in the Midwest with one on Wall Street? How do you even compare majors? How do you measure career opportunities that arise a few years after graduation because students have been well-trained when they were in college? Also, how do you distinguish between the impact of a college education and that of a MBA, especially since many graduates go back to school within 3-4 years of getting their Bachelor's degree? Isn't it a bit easy to take credit for a CEO making his or way to the top when he was a college student 40 years earlier? (What about personal drive?) Nine years after the Slate article, we haven't made much progress in measuring the quality of college education in a verifiable manner. Parents still need to rely on rankings on faith. It should come as no surprise, then, that many students apply to colleges other alumni of their high school have gone to - they (or their counselors) know the student and know whether the university is proving to be a good fit. This is as much verifiable information as they are ever going to get.

Comments

[FF]

In recent years, school shooting has become a serious problem. Is there any ranking of schools in terms of safety (e.g., the number of shooting incidents, suicide, and rapes)? Such a ranking will be very useful for parents; it will also force schools to pay more attention to safety.

[Aurelie]

Yes there are rankings in terms of school safety. The ones I'm aware of are due to Reader's Digest. You can find them at: http://www.rd.com/ranking-the-safest-and-worst-college-campuses/article53975.html
A detailed analysis is at: http://www.rd.com/images/content/2008/0802/College-Safety-Survey-Results.pdf
Some of the stats are shocking; for instance, only 31% of students at the University of Arkansas are in dorms with sprinkler systems. 54.5% of students at the University of Maryland are in dorms with peepholes or chains on the doors. I wish parents were more aware of these statistics. Some very famous universities, such as UNC-Chapel Hill or Illinois Urbana-Champaign seem to be quite lacking in terms of security.

[FF]

Thank you very much! By the way, I just found the following webpage on the US Department of Education website, http://ope.ed.gov/security/main.asp