Whistle Pig

I'd disagree. Affordability is important on the front end.

The single best assessment is "value-addedness", i.e. how much constructive value, change does the specific college environment and/or experience have upon individuals. Scholars, notably Astin and his mentor Robt. Pace have attempted to study this phenomenon for decades, recognizing that certain institutions have significantly greater impact upon their collective students than do others.

And much to the chagrin of elitists everywhere, their research suggests that it most often has little to do with "prestige/reputation", endowments, research of the faculty, etc. To the contrary, they've identified a number of no-name places that are often much lower in cost and visibility that make a far greater impact than the Ivies and many others. In fact, many of those places we might think of as the campus cat's-meow have some of the lowest impact, i.e. add lesser value than many others.

Also they've found that despite lots of hoopla, places like the big-name mega publix that tout themselves as superior, are deemed to be among the poorest facilitators of change in students. And way too much of the learning experience is passive, lecture learning, which most agree is one of the worst ways to nurture learning. Much preferred is the word of the present time ...ENGAGED. Interactive. Participative.

Now to the point. Unfortunately, value-addedness is a far too complex, expensive measurement with too many variables to control for. So, one much more pragmatic alternative they offer is simpler and more measureable. TIME.

How do undergrads spend their time. Especially relative to thinking, intellectual, interactive pursuits. Those reporting students, whatever their initial intellectual levels, spending TIME on task, develop and grow the most.

Thus my nominee for the single factor: TIME and more specifically, what a campus culture does to cultivate more students spending more time in engaged learning.

And while that is not a simple idea or measure to capture, it's amazing when one begins to look at it from that point of view, how obvious it becomes to recognize and make some evaluation.

vossron

Whistle, I think you're exactly right in terms of identifying an important factor relating to the quality of a school; given accurate measurement of this factor, schools could then be ranked by it. The job would then be to find the right match of the factor for a given student, or, alternatively, of schools that are appropriate in other ways, use this as a tipping factor.

I agree completely that this is important, but I'm afraid that few students will give it much weight.