Washington Monthly - September/October 2016 - 35

step forward in showing which colleges seem to serve their adult students well. (6) Loan repayment rates of adult students five years after entering repayment. We use this metric from the College Scorecard to see what percentage of a college's former independent students were able to pay down at least 1 of their loan's principal five years after entering repayment (typically, six months after leaving college). For the 122 colleges (all two-year institutions) that did not participate in the federal student loan program and did not fully meet all students' financial need, we assigned those colleges a repayment rate of zero. Recent research by the Institute for College Access and Success showed that nearly one million students attend community colleges that will not oﬀer their students federal loans, instead steering them to private loans with far less favorable terms to borrowers. Additionally, a new article by Mark Wiederspan of Arizona State University has found an empirical relationship between colleges that refuse to oﬀer federal loans and worse academic outcomes for their students. (7) Tuition and fees for in-district students. This metric comes from IPEDS and is a simple measure of aﬀordability. We do not use net price in the adult student rankings because net price data is only available for first-time, full-time students- a far cry from this group of students. We constructed the rankings by rescaling each of the first three measures to have a maximum score of five points each. We then standardized each of the other four measures separately for two-year and four-year colleges to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one, trimming back a small number of observations that were more than five standard deviations away from the mean. The resulting rankings are then a sum of each of the seven measures, and we show the top 100 colleges in each sector. A note on process: Initial decisions on what data to use, how to weigh that data, and which colleges to include in the rankings were made by Washington Monthly data manager and assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University Robert Kelchen, Washington Monthly guest editor and New America education program director Kevin Carey, Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris, and Becky KleinCollins, associate vice president for research and policy development at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. We then presented those decisions to a vetting committee consisting of Shanna Smith Jaggars, director of student success research for the Oﬃce of Distance Education and E-Learning at Ohio State University and formerly assistant director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University; and Jack Buckley, senior vice president for research at the College Board and formerly commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. With Jaggars's and Buckley's input, we adjusted the methodology, built the rankings, and ran the rankings past our vetting committee for final approval. -Eds. o Best Bang f r the Buc k 2015 Invest in Yourself at Baruch: One of NYC's Top Public Colleges Consistently recognized among the nation's top institutions, Baruch is a senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY), offering undergraduate, graduate and executive degree programs. As a public institution with a tradition of academic excellence, we offer accessibility and opportunity for students from every corner of New York and around the world. Explore more at baruch.cuny.edu Washington Monthly 35 http://baruch.cuny.edu http://baruch.cuny.edu

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2016