& # 39; WE. News' says it's shifted rank to focus on social mobility, but is it true?

For years, critics of college rankings of US News & World Report have said that they reward prestige and wealth. Institutions that are still at the top of the rankings – universities like Harvard, Princeton and Stanford – are recruiting students who are destined to succeed, critics say. It should not be a surprise (and not worthy of praise) that students succeed then.

What about institutions that recruit students who are not destined to do well – those who grew up in poverty, who often attended low-resource secondary schools and who did not have any capital? to find a good college or career? According to critics, it is the colleges that succeed with students who really deserve praise. As a result, a number of efforts have begun to focus on colleges that promote "social mobility" – in other words, they help propel disadvantaged families into the middle class.

The 2019 US News the rankings have come out today, and the central ranking boasts of having changed its methodology to take into account social mobility. And indeed, if you leave the top of the rankings, you can see colleges climbing up the rankings, some jumping more than the norm in a single year. But if you think it's the year where US News will finally credit the campuses of California State University or New York University for perhaps having worked harder and doing more than elites to help the less wealthy, well, do not hold your breath .

Who is the No. 1 in the new mobility influenced by mobility US News rankings? Princeton University. Who is # 2? Harvard University. It would be the same as last year, before the changes. And you will see that the Ivies and prestigious institutions likewise continue to fend for themselves, even if a fraction of the underprivileged students are enrolled elsewhere.

To understand why it can be strange to see US News boast of being swayed by the value of social mobility while ranking Princeton in mind, consider the following statistics. Princeton has exceptionally generous policies for the low income students it adheres to, and 15% of its students are eligible for Pell Grants, a common proxy for low income.

But if you look at the data on Princeton that Raj Chetty of Harvard University has prepared for The New York TimesYou will find that 72% of Princeton students come from the richest 20% in the United States. This includes 17% of the top 1% and 3.1% of the top 0.1%. Only 2.2% come from the bottom 20% of family income.

So, how is it that the addition of social mobility factors did not dislodge the institutions at the top of the ranking? The answer is in what US News changed and what it has not changed.

The magazine measured its "results" and increased its weight by 30 to 35% of its formula. Graduation rates are a part of this, and part of the formula credits are colleges that "exceed" the expected graduation rates based on the demographics of their students.

The novelty this year in the results section consists of two factors of social mobility that together represent 5% of the total ranking. One deals with the graduation rates of Pell Grant recipients and the other compares the graduation rates of Pell recipients to those of all students. These two numbers are then adjusted to account for all students who are recipients of Pell. So, if two colleges have the same graduation rates in Pell, but one of them has a greater proportion of Pell beneficiaries, the second college would earn more points in the formula. US News counts the graduation rate formula as also indicating social mobility and says that 13% of its formula is now based on social mobility.

The magazine has killed part of its methodology – the rate of acceptance – which has long been considered a reward for colleges for the number of candidates they reject. But that was only 1.25% of the formula. US News reduced weight, but kept the standardized test results at 7.75%, down 8.125%. This factor has long been criticized by those who noted that students from wealthier families earn, on average, higher scores at SAT and ACT than those who are not wealthy.

United States News modest opinion (from 22.5 to 20%) based on surveys conducted with college administrators and high school counselors – and that has long been derided to reward colleges that have a good reputation over the years. of time, largely thanks to prestige and history.

Some factors that favor rich colleges over others are unchanged: 20% of the formula is based on "faculty resources" and 10% on expenses for students.

For some institutions, the changes to the formula resulted in significant gains. The University of California, Riverside, is up 39 places, for a tie to three for 85th place. Riverside is known to have a high graduation rate (73%, well above the national median of 42%), while having a diverse student body – Riverside is a "minority" campus where 12% of students are white. Fifty-six percent of his students receive Pell Grants (five times the share of Harvard University).

Kim A. Wilcox, Chancellor of Riverside, is pleased to see that US News and others "are beginning to recognize diversity, social mobility, and student success as characteristics of what makes a great university." Wilcox noted that Riverside earns more degrees each year than any other research university. He said he was proud of this distinction "no matter the rankings".

But Wilcox added that he would like to see more changes in the way colleges are evaluated. "It will take time to reverse decades of deference to traditional institutional quality assumptions," he said.

Other university leaders say that the measures US News uses, even with low-income students, more distortion than they illuminate.

Consider Trinity Washington University, which US News considers it to be somewhere below 142nd among Northern regional universities, and not as an ordinal institution. Over 80% of Trinity students are eligible for Pell and most are first generation students.

Patricia McGuire, the President, says that colleges should be judged by the proportion of Pell-eligible students enrolled, but that using traditional graduation rates makes no sense for a number of students. reasons. First, graduation rates are a lagging indicator, she noted. Institutions that are not part of the elite with rates of more than 90% can go up and down, and the most recent rate may have little to do with the experience that future students might have.

More importantly, she added, institutions with a large proportion of underprivileged students know that many students do not graduate in six years (the federal rate and the one used in rankings). A measure that works for Ivies may not reflect the experience of Trinity or elsewhere, she said. In Trinity, the federal rate has fluctuated in recent years from 35% to 47%. But 60% of the students finish, she said, over a longer period. Colleges like Trinity enroll more students struggling with major financial problems, she said, and more students who still need help to prepare for the school year. university. This means that some students will give up and others will come back.

The measures that could work to examine elite colleges in search of small shares of Pell students do not work in other institutions, she added. And the vast majority of low-income students will not enroll in elite colleges, she noted.

"US News just does not understand the population of low-income students, "said McGuire.

Even before the publication of this year's ranking, the Chancellor of Winston-Salem State University had issued a letter saying that his institution was no longer participating in the presidents' survey and would not seek to boast of improvements. Chancellor Elwood L. Robinson noted that he had no problem with the parameters and noted that the state of Winston-Salem was very successful in improving the social mobility of students. In addition, he stated that his university had the highest proportion of graduates from the University of North Carolina system who end up working in the state.

But he said that the state of Winston-Salem and other historically black institutions are punished by US News for their mission. Access and accessibility are top priorities, he said. But the US News Rankings "require concentration in antithetical areas to our historic mission," he wrote.

Among those who have pushed for the idea of ​​social mobility measures include the Harvard Chetty, whose research has shown that the University of Texas System, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and California State University in Los Angeles are particularly likely to propel their students into success. He also noted the success of several CUNY colleges, all of which have a much higher share of students eligible for Pell than those who are at the top of the list. US News rankings. The Washington Monthly also includes measures of student success in Pell (although its best national universities overlap with those of US News).

CollegeNET takes a different approach, publishing data on social mobility that examines students' family income, tuition fees, and early-stage salaries, while ignoring factors such as the institution's reputation. CollegeNET also rejects Pell's eligibility as a factor, as a minority of families who are clearly not poor are eligible.

Jim Wolfston, president of CollegeNET, said by email that US News was trying to use his methodological changes as "a fig leaf" to hide that his rankings still favored rich institutions and rich students. He noted the parts of the methodology that favor elite institutions.

"The US News Rankings are not rankings of higher education, "said Wolfston. They are rankings of the perpetuation of economic privilege. We all know research. The closest direct correlation to the highest SAT scores is family income. Schools with the highest SAT scores are therefore "better", not because they deliver a powerful education delta to their students, but because they enroll more of the rich?

He said US News seems to have noted the public interest in social mobility while not making any significant changes in rankings to truly promote social mobility. He said it was like a soda company "announcing a slight reduction in sugar content" while continuing to sell unhealthy beverages.

Robert Morse, who runs the college ranking program at US News, said that doing more on social mobility has long been a goal of US News. "We wanted to see if schools were successful in serving all of their students for a long time, and this was the first time that we could have incorporated this information into our methodology through the federal government," he said. "They demanded that schools report Pell and non-Pell graduation rate data, which means that the data can now be used to accurately compare schools."

Asked how high-ranking traditional institutions retain their (or very similar) positions despite the new emphasis on social mobility, Morse said a number of universities were actually doing better this year because of the additional measures social mobility. He cited the University of California at Los Angeles, tied with No. 19, as one of those institutions. It was 21st last year.