Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 105

versities, we weighted each of these components equally
to determine a school's final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master's universities, and baccalaureate
colleges, which do not have extensive doctoral programs,
science and engineering PhDs were excluded and we gave
double weight to the number of alumni who go on to get
PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academy membership were not included in the research score for these institutions because such data is available for only a relative
handful of these schools.
As some readers have pointed out in previous
years, our research score rewards large schools for their
size. This is intentional. It is the huge numbers of scientists,
engineers, and PhDs that larger universities produce, combined with their enormous amounts of research spending, that will help keep America competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the two measures of university
research quality-faculty awards and National Academy
members, relative to the number of full-time faculty (from
the Center for Measuring University Performance)-are independent of a school's size.
The social mobility score is more complicated. We
have data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey that tells us the percentage of
a school's students receiving Pell Grants, which is a good
measure of a school's commitment to educating lower-income students. We'd like to know how many of these Pell
Grant recipients graduate, but schools aren't required to
report those figures. Still, because lower-income students
at any school are less likely to graduate than wealthier
ones, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is a meaningful indicator in and of itself. If a campus has a large percentage of Pell Grant students-that is to say, if its student
body is disproportionately poor-it will tend to diminish
the school's overall graduation rate.
We first predicted the percentage of students on
Pell Grants based on the average ACT/SAT score and the
percentage of students admitted. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated
with ACT/SAT scores and admit rates) are making the effort to enroll low-income students. (Since most schools
only provide the twenty-fifth percentile and the seventyfifth percentile of scores, we took the mean of the two. For
schools where a majority of students took the SAT, we converted SAT scores into ACT equivalents.)
The predicted graduation rate measure is based
on research by Robert Kelchen, assistant professor in the
Department of Education Leadership, Management and
Policy at Seton Hall University and methodologist for this
year's college guide, and Douglas N. Harris, associate professor at Tulane University. In addition to the percentage of
Pell recipients and the average ACT/SAT score, the graduation rate prediction formula includes the percentage of

students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the
number of students (overall and full-time), and institutional characteristics such as whether a college is primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate
measure in a regression model separately for each classification using average data from the last three years, imputing for missing data when necessary. Schools with graduation rates that are higher than the "average" school with
similar stats score better than schools that match or, worse,
undershoot the mark. Two colleges, the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, had predicted graduation rates of just over 100 percent. We adjusted
these predicted graduation rates to 100 percent.
We then divided the difference between the actual and predicted graduation rate by the net price of attendance, defined as the average price that first-time, full-time
students who receive financial aid pay for college after subtracting need-based financial aid. This cost-adjusted graduation rate measure rewards colleges that do a good job
of both graduating students and keeping costs low. The
two social mobility formulas (actual vs. predicted percent
Pell and cost-adjusted graduation rate performance) were
weighted equally. -Eds.

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in Walla Walla, Washington

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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