Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 22

Fighting Special Interests

Learn in New York.
Live in the Forest.
Our semesters on Communications & Media,
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Drew students commute 29 miles from our idyllic campus
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trend-setters who are shaping the world.

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22 September/October
drew.edu/forest 2014

President Obama faces three obstacles in reshaping federal higher education policy to better recognize colleges
like those we've highlighted above. First, both the academy and the American public remain deeply invested in
the way of understanding excellence in higher education
that dominates rankings like those produced by the U.S.
News & World Report. People want to believe that the
most famous colleges are also the best, that higher education works like a virtuous meritocracy, rather than a
system for transmitting privilege from the fortunate of
one generation to the next.
Second, the existing higher education elite maintains a well-oiled lobbying machine in Washington, D.C.
(see Laura Colarusso and Jon Marcus, "Who's Afraid of
College Rankings?," page 43), dedicated to beating down
any and all ideas that threaten the primacy of established institutions. The day after the Buffalo speech,
the president of the powerful American Council on Education was quoted as saying, "We will be vigilant in
working to prevent tying the receipt of aid to metrics,
which could have a profoundly negative impact on the
very students and families the administration is trying
to help," which, if nothing else, proves that the A. O.
Hirschman-style "argument from perversity" is alive
and well.
Third, important aspects of higher education success have yet to be quantified in ways that lend themselves to college rankings. Here, too, the higher education lobby is actively fighting to prevent development
of data systems that could provide more accurate information about their members' success. But this is a losing battle in the long run. The federal government already has the ability to calculate the exact earnings of
the graduates of specific colleges and individual academic programs within colleges, by matching enrollment and
financial aid information with data gathered by the Social Security Administration. This kind of data will likely become public in the near future, and will add an element of real-world outcomes that all existing college
rankings, including our own, currently lack. And while
short-term political battles can be won and lost, the future will have more information, not less.
Which is why the president's rating plan is so important. Students and parents need a neutral source of
high-quality information about prospective colleges,
good and bad (see Ben Miller, "America's Worst Colleges," page 36), regulators need to hone in on the worst
performers, and the colleges that are truly working on
behalf of their country should be celebrated. Someday,
we hope our rankings will do nothing more than update
the consensus view of higher education excellence. Until
then, we'll keep looking for new ways to identify schools
that have been ignored for too long.

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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