The nation’s largest nonprofit hedge funds — also known as elite colleges and universities — are scandalized that U.S. News & World Report has suddenly deemed their elitism out of touch.
In September, the magazine released its highly anticipated annual rankings of the nation’s “best” colleges and universities.
This year, however, U.S. News revised its formula to downplay traditional academic metrics and reward schools that foster inclusion and social mobility.
Although university administrators routinely pay lip service to these virtues, the move appears to have gone over about as well as a Republican interloper at a faculty meeting.
Institutions are no longer rewarded for recruiting top-achieving students, hiring more decorated faculty, or ensuring smaller learning environments.
Instead, the revised U.S. News formula now derives more than half of a school’s ranking from its “success in enrolling and graduating students from all backgrounds with manageable debt and post-graduate success.”
This means, for example, that Pell Grant graduation rates and performance are now worth 11% of a school’s score, up from 5%-, and first-generation graduation rates and performance now comprise 5% of a school’s total.
Such changes tend to reward large public institutions that enroll students at lower price tags.
These changes not only caused many public schools to rise in the rankings but also lowered the scores of several boutique private schools.
The Ivies, along with Stanford and MIT, continue their reign at the very top.
But in the next tier, traditionally elite private universities not on the coasts were hit especially hard.
Many of those institutions have reacted with a newfound concern that accessibility and opportunity risk crowding out traditional academic metrics of success that kept them atop the rankings in previous years.
In short, these elite schools want to have their cake and eat it too.
One of our alma maters, Vanderbilt, slipped from its highest prior ranking of 13 to 18.
To quell concerns among students and alumni, it issued a scathing statement that tried to affirm its commitment to inclusion, while assailing efforts to measure it.
As Bloomberg reports, while the new rankings increased their “emphasis on weighing a college’s ability to graduate students from different backgrounds, amid criticism that the rankings reward wealthy institutions,” Vanderbilt argued that the magazine used incorrect data to evaluate social mobility.
But despite its purported continued commitment to inclusion, what Vanderbilt is really upset about is the devaluation of academic criteria.
Vanderbilt claims to score well on measures of student and faculty quality and called U.S. News’ emphasis on social mobility a “policy concern” that should not be intertwined with educational quality.
Other schools reacted similarly.
Wake Forest University, another southern private school, slid 18 spots, to 47.
It complained that the new formula removes “consideration of small class size and teaching by professors with a terminal degree,” such as PhDs, which, it argued, were “long-standing institutional priorities valued by Wake Forest students, faculty and alumni.”
Tulane University dropped a whopping 29 spots, falling outside the top 70.
Interestingly, after the Supreme Court’s decision this summer banning affirmative action, Tulane affirmed its commitment to racial preferences: “We know the best research and learning occurs on a campus that reflects our multicultural world, which in turn has the most positive impact on improving our society.” Yet, the school’s tune has now changed: “We applaud this focus on socio-economic mobility but believe that these new rankings, while potentially valuable for some purposes, are less relevant for most students who are seeking information about where they will find the most engaging and rewarding academic experience.”
Worshippers at the church of DEI are suffering for failing to appease their high priests.
Still, as gameable as these rankings have always been, the changes raise a more serious issue for higher education: the inherent tension between pursuing broader social goods and focusing more narrowly on merit and academic excellence.
Consider blogger Matthew Yglesias’s observations about the trade-off between exceptionalism and inclusivity in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision:
“I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. I’m not 100% sure what to tell people in this situation. But if you want to be equitable and inclusive, go teach in a community college or a public high school. If you want to cultivate excellence among a social elite, then own up to that as a mission in life. I don’t think there’s one right thing to do, but it’s deeply confusing to try to do both of them simultaneously.”
Indeed, if selective universities value social mobility more than elitism, they need to make sacrifices that may cost them money and prestige.
Do universities mean what they say about inclusion?
Those who do should consider a recent proposal from Manhattan Institute senior fellow Roland Fryer.
The Harvard economist estimates that, for $4 billion (or around 2 percent of their combined endowments), top-tier universities could build “feeder schools” capable of producing 5,000 high-quality minority students apiece.
Finding creative methods to open the gates would be a better solution than lowering admissions standards and devaluing merit.
Unfortunately, elite universities have long preferred to signal their virtue rather than to spend their endowments producing genuine change.
So the devaluation of merit continues, and Vanderbilt gets sacrificed to the DEI deities.
Michael Hartney is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Matthew Malec is the Special Projects Coordinator at Echelon Insights.
