The following essay, written by someone who was involved in the Forbes “Best Colleges”, starts out as a standard attack on the college rankings, but then has this little nugget in the middle about the “Environmental” factor used in some ranking systems.
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/10/same-old-college-rankings-what-did-you-expect/
Can anyone confirm this allegation that the ranking systems use campus diversity as part of their scoring systems?
The relatively new WSJ/THE ranking does (counts for 10%).
If you really want to know, you can look up the criteria for each ranking of interest. Surely that cannot be too difficult.
For example, here are the USNWR criteria:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights
Michigan’s entire undergrad population is 12% URM- Black, Hispanic/Latino, Native American. If the author really believes that that counts as diverse, well, that’s probably why they’re writing for somewhere like Minding the Campus.
As someone who teaches a race and ethnicity course here, I can say unequivocally that the university would be better with a much more economically and racially diverse student body.
Ok, it looks like it is complaining specifically about the WSJ/THE rankings, whose methodology it is described here:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/wall-street-journal-times-higher-education-college-rankings-methodology (surely, you could have looked this up, right?)
So it is not a complaint about rankings in general.
@romanigypsyeyes , care to elaborate why it would be better? I’d really like your opinion as as UM prof.
Thank you for finding this (I did look). The WSJ/THE rankings do place a 10 percent weight on Environmental explained as follows:
So colleges with higher international students get a bump, but it is debatable whether or not a high percentage of international students is a positive or a negative.
Gini calculations are typically tied to income inequality, so I wonder how this particular Gini-Simpson calculation works.
It is not hard to look up what the Gini-Simpson index is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_index#Gini.E2.80.93Simpson_index
Here is the criteria for the Forbes 2017 college rankings https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2017/08/02/top-colleges-2017-the-methodology/#138e72d4e44a
What we really like about the Forbes rankings are their “Forbes Financial Grades” which assesses the financial health of each college (see that methodology at the link below). A college with A+ or A ratings is likely to have well maintained facilities and generous financial aid, while a college with a poor financial grade is likely to have significant problems which might not necessarily be evident in other college rankings.
On balance, our family found the Forbes college rankings the most useful during our D’s college search.
If you want to know about the financial aid, better to just try the college’s net price calculator instead of making indirect assumptions based on its financial management.
" I can say unequivocally that the university would be better with a much more economically and racially diverse student body."
Better for whom and how so?? UM grads are in high demand due to high selectivity and tough reputation. How would that be improved under your theory??
I guess I’ll bite on the ‘better for whom and how so’ in general.
My kids attend a very homogeneous rural high school. We send them off to college hoping they will have the opportunity to meet peers and faculty that come from different cultures, religions, and socio-economic backgrounds because they will have to communicate with, relate to, work with and serve a diverse set of people over their lifetime.
Our experience with college net price calculators online was disappointing to say the least. The actual financial aid offers our D received from the colleges she applied to weren’t close to what their online net price calculators suggested after we submitted the FAFSA and CSS PROFILE. From our experience, we would recommend overly relying on net price calculators colleges provide online.
The financial aid a well managed college in healthy financial condition can provide is just one aspect of a good college experience. The Forbes Financial Grade was an important criteria that we used to reduce the number of colleges our D would consider applying to.
Plethora of research put out by bschools, think tanks, and consulting firms point toward diversity as being correlated with high performance. If you’re asking for whom diversity helps, well, it helps the students perform better when they enter a globalized workforce.
Bottom line, more diversity leads to higher performing groups:
People who are closed minded tend to be rigid in their analysis and thought. They simply do not have the exposure to think beyond their view of the world, often making disastrous decisions for their companies. When we’re brought in to figure out why a company is underperforming, people who ask similar questions to what you’re asking—“why do we need more diversity”—are almost always the first to get cut. Surprise, surprise: the leadership team dramatically improves as a result and are better equipped to turn around the business.
That same McKinsey study found that the relationship between gender diversity and financial performance was not statistically significant for US and Canadian companies. Then, there’s the matter of how you define diversity. A company can have a diverse board or executive management team without having a diverse workforce overall or vice versa.