Washington Monthly college rankings

Kevin Drum points to a new set of college and university rankings created by the Washington Monthly as a counter-point to the much-derided but undeniable influential US News rankings.  The idea is to rank the institutions in terms of their service to the country rather than in terms of their value to prospective students: 

The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth; and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service. We designed our evaluation system accordingly.

I don't think that this is a particularly useful way to judge colleges and universities - call me old-fashioned, but I still think that education and research should be the core mission of a college - and even if it were useful, the methodology is really problematic.  But it's still an interesting exercise.  It is frankly and explicitly aspirational, hoping to motivate institutions to devote more attention to service:

Imagine, then, what would happen if thousands of schools were suddenly motivated to try to boost their scores on The Washington Monthly College Rankings. They'd start enrolling greater numbers of low-income students and putting great effort into ensuring that these students graduate. They'd encourage more of their students to join the Peace Corps or the military. They'd intensify their focus on producing more Ph.D. graduates in science and engineering. And as a result, we all would benefit from a wealthier, freer, more vibrant, and democratic country.

I was particularly intrigued to learn that

"Williams, which U.S. News ranks as the top liberal arts school in the country, wound up at #14 on our list, one slot below Presbyterian, largely because of its weak service numbers." 

Should my college care about this shocking fall from its much-cherished top berth? 

Comments

[John Penta]

AA, as one of the few undergrads that probably reads this...

You'd be right, except that most universities focus far more on research and grad work than what's supposed to be their mission - teaching undergrads.

Recall, for example, that most profs hate doing intro courses (or even most undergrad courses). Ergo, the pickings are very, very slim for the undergrad for the most necessary courses.

I agree with you re the focus on "service". It's probably not smart.

However, the traditional idea of "research and education" is broken too.

I don't think, frankly, you can mix education and research. It really is one or the other. Nobody wants to admit that, though; Faculty pick schools for research. Nobody chooses to teach, seemingly, it's just something you do because you're forced.

Meanwhile, students still pick a school pretty much blind. Guidance counselors try hard (mine sure did), but nobody really has any info to go off of, and college visits are - to be frank - the most misleading things you could ever embark upon.

Why no backlash, though?

Because...The modern university hardly listens to students, anyhow. Parents are often in the bind that transferring may not be a sure bet (or even very possible), and student loans add inertia.

The modern university serves two masters - faculty and (maybe) students. In roughly that order.

And it does so as badly as one would expect.

[hummbumm]

that is all we need, to try and give incentive to universities to "inculcate and encourage an ethic of service". If anything is to be inculcated at universities is an appreciation for the free market capitalist system, that powers both the fundraising and the endowments of these institutions. There already is such a gap between the infantalizing ethos of campus life and the real world, there is no need to make it bigger.

[Brian Ulrich]

John-

As a grad student, I sympathize with your complaints about faculty who care only about research. However, a lot of that depends on where you're at. Faculty at research universities are there because that was their priority, and many (though not quite all) fit the model you describe. Meanwhile, most faculty at teaching-oriented schools love it there, at least in my experience.

I don't think it really has to be one-or-the-other. Particularly in the sciences, I think many undergrads benefit from being around top-flight research projects. Even in the Humanities, there needs to be some way to keep faculty current in their fields.

[Brian Ulrich]

Also, one reason people hate intro courses is because they spend a lot of time on stuff outside their area of interest. If you're a Middle Easternist by trade, it takes an effort you might not enjoy to brush up on European diplomacy in the 1700's for that World History survey. Even in you favorite areas, you just go over the basics.

The root of some of this is that graduate education takes place almost exclusively in research institutions, and people are judged and funded primarily on the basis of their research. I'm not a radical reformer - as noted above, I think you need to do good research to really understand a field from the inside and therefore teach it better - but there is an imbalance in the system. It's old news that the skills you learn in grad school are usually different from and in tension with those most jobs require.

[SP]

John - sympathize with your frustration about faculty who don't seem to care about teaching, but I honestly don't think you can be a good teacher without being a good scholar and researcher. If you're a good scholar, your passion for your work communicates itself to your students. I do wish more academics remembered that teaching is their bread and butter. Academics are human and try to dodge what they don't like to do, and tenure doesn't help accountability either.

I do find the idea of judging universities by their public usefulness interesting, however. Private American schools are still judged far too much on reputation, money, pretty campuses and the "toys" they can offer students (often at the expense of financial aid budgets), and I like the idea of ranking schools according to how they serve low-income students. Most schools haven't made the trade-offs necessary for a real transition from country clubs for the children of the rich to more broad-based institutions.

While universities are always responsive to the political needs of the day - if for no other reason than funding for graduate language and area studies programs depends on the state - I think there are still advantages in academic independence. Remember the Cold War!

[Ben P]

I'm of the belief that this ranking system is going to do a good bit to change perceptions about what Universities are best. Of course, they've chosen a fairly arbitrary set of criteria, but so too have US News, which is largely predicated on asking professors which Univ. they think are best reputationally.

Don't for a second think that the very large state universities that fair better by Washington Monthly's criteria - Texas A&M, UCSD, and so forth aren't going to shout these findings to anyone willing (or not willing) to listen. This isn't going to make Princeton and Harvard "bad" or "inferior," but over time I think this might work to break a bit of their reputational advantage.

[hummbumm]

the ivy league was the ivy league before US News did their ranking. To think that somehow UCSD will vault ahead of Harvard based on social mobility, and instilling of service is ludicrous. Now I thought that free secondary education was the vehicle for social mobility. What is next, graduate schools will soon be expected to further social mobility at the expense of scholarship? Ooops, it seems like that is already happening. this new ranking seems to me like someone ranking cars on some price/value scale. Yes Toyota corrola is a great car, and provides reliability and a degree of comfort for almost everyone (social mobility and service). It is number one!! But, if I had the means, I would still buy the Porsche 911 (reputation, money, pretty campuses and toys). People are not stupid, no one will turn down Harvard undergrad for UCSD based on a ranking. Don't mean to pick on UCSD, which i am sure is a fine institution.

[hk]

Brian,

It's not quite true that liberal arts colleges remain bastions of teaching without research, as far as my personal experience goes. A number of liberal arts colleges are interested in those who are capable of good bit of research as well as teaching. While I don't doubt certain people's ability to conduct good research while being good teachers--e.g. AA--this shifting emphasis can't be good for teaching.

Besides, most undergrads in this country go to to big state colleges, and quite frankly, we're horrible at teaching.

[Brian Ulrich]

hk - I know, as in Williams, Swarthmore, etc. I don't think I even mentioned liberal arts colleges, though I went to one that was very non-research oriented. I would also include a lot of smaller state campuses in the teaching fold, too, such as UW-Whitewater.

[Stacey]

First, I think it's a little off to say that most faculty go to a school for the research - most faculty (there are a LOT of Ph.Ds out there) end up at smaller or mid-sized institutions. Part of the problem is that when one is getting the Ph.D., one is usually at a research institution, so this forms the basis of what one would consider a top-shelf job.

As a Ph.D. student at Penn, for example, every professor I know has chosen to be a researcher first, teacher second - otherwise, they'd never have gotten the job. At Smith, where I studied as an undergrad, it was often the reverse. But I'm 100% in agreement that you can't be a good teacher unless you're a good scholar, and it's important to note that Smith, along with a whole lot of other "top 20" liberal arts colleges (I assume Williams does this), has only a 2-2 teaching load and a fair amount of fuding available for faculty research. This allows faculty to stay up to date in their fields, and to teach well.

Of course, this comes at a cost, and state universities are rarely at liberty to past such costs onto taxpayers, so for the short term, these set ups seem unfortunately limited to small but wealthy colleges with small but wealthy student bodies.

[John Penta]

Re Academics and teaching:

Reading everybody's comments, I'm...not so sure.

See, part of the problem is that you can be a great scholar, but be absolutely horrific in the classroom.

Or have previously been able to maintain that balance, but have since lost skill at teaching, which happens *often*.

Part of what tends to cause trouble here is a severe disconnect, I think, between what *faculty* think they need to know to teach and what is generally assumed they know by everybody else.

We can all name examples; I'm still surprised (though less and less so) when I find a prof that has basically no computer skills, or that's been around for decades and refuses to, say, communicate with the disability services office.

(Oh, and a related rant. When you are short staffed such that even staffing required courses in a department is difficult, *do not* then say you won't use adjuncts! Scranton is doing that. I may be young, but I am not stupid. I can just *see* the train wreck that's going to result come when we sign up for spring courses. As a student, frankly, I would many times *like* having adjuncts around; They generally have more of a clue about the world beyond their own small department, and they help keep classes available.)

[John Penta]

Re Academics and teaching:

Reading everybody's comments, I'm...not so sure.

See, part of the problem is that you can be a great scholar, but be absolutely horrific in the classroom.

Or have previously been able to maintain that balance, but have since lost skill at teaching, which happens *often*.

Part of what tends to cause trouble here is a severe disconnect, I think, between what *faculty* think they need to know to teach and what is generally assumed they know by everybody else.

We can all name examples; I'm still surprised (though less and less so) when I find a prof that has basically no computer skills, or that's been around for decades and refuses to, say, communicate with the disability services office.

(Oh, and a related rant. When you are short staffed such that even staffing required courses in a department is difficult, *do not* then say you won't use adjuncts! Scranton is doing that. I may be young, but I am not stupid. I can just *see* the train wreck that's going to result come when we sign up for spring courses. As a student, frankly, I would many times *like* having adjuncts around; They generally have more of a clue about the world beyond their own small department, and they help keep classes available.)

[hk]

Stacey,

It's not just that the faculty members have necessarily "chosen" to be researcher first. The incentive structure is built such that you are given very little reward for being a good teacher, but almost everything for being a good researcher--by the universities as well as by the field they are in. Of course, having top scholars in the field brings prestige to the university, in the manner that having the best teachers doesn't--heck, who besides only a fairly small number of students know or even care whether someone is a good teacher anyways? Besides, teaching at large state universities is not conducive to being effective teachers, I think, except for the very best--trying to grab attention from 100+ students in a large lecture hall, which is the case in nearly every class, can be downright nightmarish. It's also not very conducive to doing something creative and interesting--and students, at least in large state universities, at any rate--just want to know what they need to know to do well on exams and get good grades.

[aardvark]

These comments remind me how lucky I am to teach at Williams, where teaching really is taken seriously, and students get a lot more than you all are (probably correctly) describing.

Hey, Brian - I actually taught at Whitewater about a decade ago. I didn't think of it as a teaching institution at the time (I had a four-four load, for one thing), but it was a nice place with some very interesting students.

[John Penta]

AA: What do you mean by a four-four load, a two-two load, etc?

[aardvark]

Normal number of courses per semester. At Williams I'm expected to teach two courses a semester, hence 2-2; at Whitewater it was 4-4. When I taught on a post-doc at Berkeley, it appeared that the average load for many faculty was closer to 0-0, but I was young and naive then...