School ranking season

And yet again US News and World Report ranks its favorites based on arbitrary guidelines. Not to be outdone, The Washinton Monthly proves it can be even more arbitrary.

My usual complaint with these rankings is they score stupid things like graduation rate. If you graduate 100% of your class, hey you did perfect, right? You're probably turning out a good percentage of apathetic stoners, but at least you have a high ranking. The problem with this attitude is that it encourages schools to coddle students rather than work them. Now maybe my little trash-talking here is typical of engineers. My program dumped a good 20-30% of it's students off into other majors, some because they didn't like the subject, but most because they couldn't comprehend the material. I advocate this process: call it grading, call it weeding-out, call it natural selection...it works. Medical school has it's own competitive selection process, mostly because we don't want inept doctors. If you've ever driven a car over a bridge or flown on an airplane, you don't want inept engineers. You don't want inept lawyers or businessmen, or teachers, or anything else. Why do we reward schools that don't keep high standards? Elementary school is a fine place for "no-child-left-behind". College, on the other hand, should require some minimal display of merit.

Back to Washington Monthly.

Their list uses the percentage of students in Army or Navy Reserve Officer
Training Corps (ROTC), the percentage of graduates in the Peace Corps, the
percentage of federal work-study grants used for community service projects, the
total amount of research spending, the number of doctorates granted in the hard
sciences and, as a measure of social mobility, the percentage of students on
Pell Grants, with a bonus for schools whose graduation rates are higher than
expected for having so many low-income students.

Now I don't have children, but while choosing a college, I heard enough from my parents to know what their primary concern was: That after graduation, their massive expediture prove to be a good investment, and that I could make a decent living in a profession I find worthwhile. (And it would have worked, had it not been for grad school!). Lest this seem parentally biased, my thoughts were along the same lines-with a little added concern for the social environment.

For the record, my family was very proud when my sister applied to the Peace Corps, and I obviously endorse "doctorates granted in the hard sciences", but ranking education based any of the Washington Monthly's criteria is total rubbish. Perhaps they try to address that.

A word on our criteria. This is the first Washington Monthly College
Rankings. In future years, we would prefer to expand our criteria and develop an
even more comprehensive measure of the qualities by which colleges and
universities enrich our country. There's only one problem: Many of these data
aren't available. We would love, for example, to add a category measuring
academic excellence. It's nearly impossible, however, to directly gauge the
quality of education a student receives at a given school. [emphasis added]

Hmm. The assays for academic achievement were too poorly defined so they decided to measure something else entirely.