The world may or may not need another college rankings system; on that question, commentators and pundits are divided.
The creators of a new entry acknowledge the limitations of the genre, but argue that their version -- imperfect as it may be -- improves on the competition by analyzing thousands of colleges of all types (instead of hundreds of mostly selective ones) and assessing them based on how much the institutions themselves contribute to the economic success of their graduates.
In a report (with associated data set) published today, called "Beyond College Rankings: A Value-Added Approach to Assessing Two- and Four-Year Schools," two Brookings Institution researchers offer a complicated tool designed to help consumers and policy makers gauge how thousands of two- and four-year institutions prepare students for the workforce.
The authors' approach is distinctive in numerous ways, several of which are also likely to make it controversial in some quarters.
First, it covers a much more expansive set of two- and four-year colleges (several thousand) than do rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Forbes and Washington Monthly, which typically focus on selective colleges because students' admissions credentials are so central to their criteria. Second, by adjusting for the traits of the students the colleges enroll (so that highly selective colleges aren't rewarded for admitting only well-prepared students who would fare well under any circumstances), the system purports to measure how much the institutions themselves contribute to their graduates' economic success.
"We thought it would be much better to have a value-added system than one that rewards elite colleges for attracting the most-prepared students," said Jonathan Rothwell, the lead author and a fellow in Brookings's Metropolitan Policy Program.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/29/new-ranking-system-links-colleges-and-students-characteristics-graduate-economic