
The U.S. government tried to rank colleges in 1911 - magda_wang
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/6/5973653/the-federal-government-tried-to-rank-colleges-in-1911
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HarryHirsch
The current Obama proposal has problems, the suggested metrics (six-year
graduation rate, tuition cost and employment after graduation) are problematic
and too easily gamed.

Salaries are the biggest expense at a university, you can easily cut those by
shifting to more adjuncts. With the shape the academic labour market is in,
that is easily done. Quality of instruction drops, but the students don't
mind, they are there for credentials, not for an education. What does suffer
is the idea of a university.

Graduation rate is really problematic. You can fix that by watering down
standards, again the students don't mind, it's more A's for everyone, they are
there for credentials, but what you would really like to do is to admit more
students and weed those out that can't hack it in their first year, before
they are welded to the wrong career track.

As for employment after graduation, look no further than third-tier law
schools with their legal clinics that employ their graduates. Such places need
to be shut down today.

~~~
Retric
Instructors are not really that large of a budget item at collages.
Administrative overhead has continued to grow due to a wide range of factors
including such things as the new demand for IT at all schools.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Administrative overhead _is_ growing, but you can't cut there - you need
functional infrastructure. So you cut where you can, and that is at the
teaching end.

By the way, part of the growing infrastructure is because universities are
trying to attract non-traditional students, such as first-generation students,
minorities and non-Western students. You can drop a middle-class US guy into a
US university, and he will do just fine. But a minority student may need
tutoring (because his high school plainly sucked), someone from China will
need help with cultural adjustment, and a first-generation student may not
even know how to study (his family is of no help). All this is motivated by
the need for more bodies paying tuition.

~~~
wtbob
> Administrative overhead is growing, but you can't cut there - you need
> functional infrastructure.

A college needs gardeners, programmers, network admins and secretaries; does
it need Vice Presidents of Student Diversity and football coaches?

~~~
rayiner
Football coaches pay for themselves.

As for vice presidents of student diversity, I think they get a bad rap. As
college expands to include more than just the children of the rich, you need
additional support infrastructure for students:
[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-
gr...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-
graduate.html)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Or perhaps colleges simply need to stop admitting students without adequate
preparation in the name of "diversity". I'm also uncertain what "diversity"
has to do with "children of the rich". Maybe you could explain?

According to the article you link to, the "diverse" students have SAT scores
200 pts lower than average and perform even worse than that SAT gap would
predict. It seems a bit unfair to charge students who study for exams extra
money simply to pay for extra help to those who don't (e.g., "Vanessa" in the
article you link to).

~~~
rayiner
Here is the relevant statistic:

> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who
> come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational
> outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students
> like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between
> 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from
> families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating
> with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile,
> they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

We're talking about students with similar SAT scores displaying dramatically
different graduation outcomes based on parental income. The function of
college, especially state colleges, isn't to reward people for being on the
ball earlier in life, especially considering how much that has to do with
parental education and income. It's to educate the populace, and enable upward
mobility within society. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish to not spend money
helping lower-income students graduate at the same rate as higher-income
students with similar SAT scores. Every low-income student with above-average
SAT scores that doesn't graduate college is a huge missed opportunity for the
state to put a capable and educated person into the workforce.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The article suggests later on that Vanessa is atypical: _To get a better sense
of who these struggling students were, Laude started pulling records...almost
all of them had low SAT scores — low for U.T., at least — often below 1,000 on
a 1,600-point scale._

A _200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections_ (one
of them being the "we won't call it remedial" section) is also discussed.

Also, take a look at why Vanessa needed help, at least as per the article's
implication: "She failed her first test in statistics...At Mesquite High, she
never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying."

You also seem to believe that putting heroic efforts into teaching students
thing will somehow help them become a capable worker. That might be true for a
few rote fields - perhaps Vanessa's nursing career might be one of them [1].
But except for fields where college is mere rote training in procedures,
that's not actually producing capable workers. When I hire, giving me a person
who can only learn new things if I invest heroic effort and personal attention
is useless - I need my employees to figure things out on their own.

[1] I know little about nursing - from the outside it appears fairly rote, but
I'm open to being corrected on this

~~~
rayiner
It's useful to quote the part that comes after that:

> Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started
> giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he
> said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200
> points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the
> larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of
> students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their
> sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and
> three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T.
> average.

Individualized help took these students who were scoring 200 points below the
rest of the students, and got them to the point where they were scoring
comparably to everyone else on exams and graduating at above the average
graduation rate. That's a huge success from the state's perspective.

So what if these students came in under-prepared? These kids are often first-
generation college students, whose parents have no experience with the whole
process and don't inculcate the right values in their kids. The kids from more
privileged backgrounds, even ones who aren't any smarter (going by SAT
scores), have a leg-up going in due to factors that are mostly in their favor
as a result of the parental lottery. Why should that entitle them to a
perpetual leg-up?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Near as I can tell, he's devoting more than 10x the resources to this class.
Instead of 1 lecturer + 500 students, it's 1 lecturer + 50. Plus 2 hours of
extra instruction, so maybe it's 16x resources (assuming chem is normally 3
hours of instruction/week, (5/3)x10 ~ 16). Plus advisers tracking these
students, peer mentors, etc.

It's hardly clear that graduating additional marginal students is worth 16x
what graduating a normal student is worth. Can you explain why you believe it
is?

Lets put the numbers into perspective. Instead of teaching 1 remedial 50
person class, this guy could teach a second 500 person class. 450 additional
students could be educated at UT. Why is Vanessa worth more than 10 better
prepared students?

~~~
Denzel
It's a calculated expenditure with the expectation of creating future
benefits, not just for UT, but for society in general. They're investing in a
high-growth segment of the market. We can reasonably assume that the cost to
attract and educate a student from a family with a college-going tradition is
minimal compared to that of a first-generation student. Furthermore, by
graduating a first-generation student, it's possible that a new college-going
tradition is started in their existing family or any subsequent families they
interact with.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If it's a calculated expenditure, what's the calculation? Something concrete
please, not platitudes.

 _We can reasonably assume that the cost to attract and educate a student from
a family with a college-going tradition is minimal compared to that of a
first-generation student._

This means we get the most bang for our buck if we focus on the good students,
and only consider devoting resources to the bad ones after we exhaust the
supply of good ones.

That seems to contradict your idea of a "calculated expenditure".

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tokenadult
The statement in the article is that "colleges in the top tier, perhaps
unsurprisingly, didn't complain." Meanwhile, colleges with lower rankings
complained about them so much that the President issued an executive order
prohibiting further publication of the ratings. I'm not worried about this
today. There should be data-gathering along various dimensions showing what
the trade-offs are of attending one or another college. A good current effort
in that direction is the foundation-funded nonprofit website College
Results,[1] which aggregates data that colleges are already required to report
to the federal government (which is one of the biggest funders of all aspects
of higher education in the United States) and presents the data in a user-
friendly format. I frequently recommend the College Results website to parents
whose children are trying to decide what college to attend. Figure out what
trade-off dimensions are meaningful to you, and get the best information you
can about how colleges differ along each dimension. College is supposedly very
consequential for your future. It is certainly very expensive for some people.
Find out more before committing to one or another college.

[1] [http://www.collegeresults.org/](http://www.collegeresults.org/)

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pmorici
Doesn't this already exist, albeit in a private capacity, with things like the
US News rankings?

~~~
jkimmel
The US News rankings have a lot of factors which can easily be gamed and/or
probably aren't relevant to ranking an institution based on quality. One that
comes to mind is including the "Easiness" factor from RateMyProfessor as a
positive metric (easier schools are ranked more highly).

On a more philosophical level, having a private 3rd party control the
decisions of our college-bound youth could become problematic. How likely is
it that the US News rankings may have some sort of bias, anything from an
analyst's alma mater being ranked higher to quid pro quo bribery? Hopefully, a
public institution would be more robust in the face of these biases.

~~~
caseysoftware
Whenever there are humans involved, there will be biases. Making it a
government entity instead of a private entity doesn't change that. People are
people.

~~~
adventured
There always seems to be a deep prevalence to think that the government is a
purely objective, magic entity with no agenda or bias, rather than consisting
of people, each with their own agenda and bias, like everyone else (and worse,
consisting of parties that create strong group biases and agendas).

Even if you assumed the government perfectly represented the people, it would
possess a very blatant agenda and bias, in the form of representing said
people and what they vote in favor of.

I'd argue governments as political entities - keeping in mind what it takes to
win in politics - are far more likely to hold extreme biases and agendas.

Any government system of reviewing universities will possess tremendous bias
toward whatever people are in power that oversee such reviews. They will
obviously rate universities that meet their favored criteria higher, matching
up with their world-views about education / societal issues / etc.

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madengr
The method in the article, i.e. how well one is prepared for graduate school,
IS probably the best method. It really boils down to how much you know given
your GPA. Of course maybe I'm biased since my school, KU, was 1st tier.

