New Ranking Criteria

collegeparent
Thu, 01 Jun 2006 11:29:58 +0000

Here’s another take on the subject, from an American POV. This was from another Chronicle article published two months ago:

Another Accountability Idea: a New Database That Would Customize College Rankings
By KELLY FIELD

While testing of students is the most publicized piece of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s approach to accountability for colleges, it is only one piece.

The panel is also working on a concept for a database that would allow consumers to rank colleges based on variables of their choosing, and it intends to endorse a controversial plan to create another database to track the educational progress of every college student in the United States.

The rankings database, which Charles Miller, chairman of the commission, envisions as an alternative to the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, will contain information from the Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey, which includes data on enrollment, institutional revenue and expenditures, tuition, and other key indicators, as well as information on institutional performance.

It will not include students’ scores on any specific standardized test, like the Collegiate Learning Assessment, though Mr. Miller says that information could be incorporated into the database if a test emerged as the national standard.

Unlike U.S. News & World Report, the database will not rank colleges – Mr. Miller says the Education Department “is not in the ranking business” – but it will allow users to generate personal rankings based on the weights they assign to variables like total enrollment, student aid, and graduation rates.

“You could create an infinite number of rankings, and then all of a sudden, it’s no longer a monopoly,” he says. “It won’t be in the hands of one publisher who won’t tell you how they got the rankings.” (Robert J. Morse, director of data research for U.S. News & World Report, says the magazine has given out such detailed explanations of the rankings “that many people in higher ed have produced simulated models.”)

While the idea of a rankings database is likely to appeal to colleges, the commission’s plan to endorse a proposed Education Department system that would collect individual student data and track students’ progress is more divisive. Supporters of such a "unit system, including lobbyists for state colleges, say it would allow the government to better track transfer students and calculate an institution’s net price, or what students actually pay after financial aid is taken into account.

Opponents of unit records, including private colleges and privacy-rights groups on both the left and the right, say the system – which would utilize students’ Social Security numbers – is fraught with possible security problems.

The commission, however, “is convinced that there is good technology out there that can provide privacy guarantees,” said Charles M. Vest, a commission member and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at a recent public hearing in Boston.

Education Department officials first offered the idea of a unit-record system in 2004, but that idea was rejected by members of Congress from both political parties. Asked in an interview if he was beating a dead horse, Mr. Miller said he was not focusing on the politics of the proposal.

“Our job is to provide recommendations that help the system get better,” he said.