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The University of California at Los Angeles has received the first rank of the best public schools among the national universities. | Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images
US News and World Report revises its widely read university ranking formula to reward schools that enroll and graduate to more students from low-income families – a POLITICO report
The new methodology is reflected in the 2019 edition of "Best Colleges" on Monday. This is the first update of the rankings since POLITICO said that they create incentives for schools to favor richer students compared to less fortunate applicants. Rankings are so widely followed in academia that some colleges have incorporated them into strategic plans.
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Yet the top of the US ranking has not changed much in years. The top places among national universities are still dominated by the Ivy League and other elite private schools. Princeton and Harvard were No. 1 and No. 2. Third place was shared between Columbia, MIT, University of Chicago and Yale.
The formula now includes indicators to measure "social mobility" and removes a measure of acceptance rate that benefits schools that have discarded the most students. US News reports that the changes are based on discussions with college leaders over the past year and that the new social mobility indicator is based on newly available federal data.
Among the colleges that have benefited most from the changes are the entire California university system – in part because universities have had a high proportion of low-income students, said US News chief strategist Robert Morse. & World Report.
Five schools at the University of California were ranked among the top 10 public schools among the national universities: Los Angeles ranked first, Berkeley ranked second, Santa Barbara tied for fifth, Irvine ranked seventh and Davis tied # 10.
"The news from the United States is continually changing the methodology of the best colleges," said Morse. "We are actively and continuously discussing the best way to measure the quality of education, and we pay particular attention to this debate.Over time, our ranking model has put more emphasis on outcome measures "I wanted to measure whether schools were successful in serving all of their students, regardless of their economic status".
The new social mobility indicators represent 5% of the ranking formula. One of them simply weighs the graduation rate of students who receive federal Pell scholarships, which go to low-income students.
The other indicator goes a step further and measures the graduation rate differences of Pell Grant students and students who do not receive Pell scholarships in the same school, which, according to Morse, "assesses the success of students." a school their peers. "
The scores are adjusted so that schools that register the highest percentage of low-income students get the most credit for these graduation rates, Morse said.
Previously, the formula only considered economic diversity through a measure called "graduation rate performance," which controls factors such as test scores and income, and predicts a school's graduation rate. If the actual rate is higher, US News estimated that the college "improved results, or that it outperformed," which would give a boost.
This factor remains and, combined with the new indicators of social mobility, Morse says that 13% of a school's rank now depends on the economic diversity of its campus.
American news does not take into account the acceptance rate of the school. It encouraged schools with lower rates – a measure that many colleges sought to achieve by relying more on admissions to advance decision-making, which hurt low-income students who were seeking financial assistance.
The publication also gives less weight to a measure of student selectivity that relies heavily on student scores on tests such as SAT and ACT – which have been shown to correlate with wealth. The measure represents only 10% of the formula, against 12.5% for the formula.
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