Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 15

INTRODUCTION:

A DIFFERENT KIND
OF COLLEGE RANKING
By Kevin Carey

he carnival of corruption and deceit that is the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal has created
many windows onto the sorry state of American higher
education, and of American society at large. How the rich and
powerful, unsatisfied with the enormous and growing advantages of our winner-take-all society, bribed and cheated to take
even more. How athletic coaches simply diverted graft money
normally claimed by college "development" officials into their
own pockets. How the market price of an elite admissions slot
can reach upward of $6 million, based on what one wealthy Chinese family was willing to pay.
But the core truth exposed by the FBI is even more disturbing. The sheer venality of the scandal is the inevitable consequence of a higher education system unmoored from any honest
appraisal of how well colleges help students learn.
Finding and publicizing such information is one of the
Washington Monthly College Guide's prime directives. Over the
last fifteen years, we've steadily added new data to our rankings of what colleges do for their country by promoting social
mobility, research, and public service. That perspective, unlike
the wealth- and status-obsessed rankings published by U.S. News
& World Report, creates a very different definition of excellence.
It's not surprising, for example, that no B-list celebrities
were arrested for bribing their children into Utah State University, our fourteenth-ranked national university: it already admits
89 percent of students who apply. We rank Utah State so high
because it's very good at helping low-income students graduate
and get good jobs. It was not designed to exclude people, which is
why it doesn't even crack the top 200 at U.S. News.
Nor did any venture capitalist financiers pay off a test proctor to wangle their progeny into Cedar Crest College of Pennsylvania, our fifth-ranked master's-granting university, which does
a great job of promoting civic engagement and sending its graduates into the Peace Corps and PhD programs. Few of its students
appear to be partying on yachts during spring break or getting
paid to promote branded products on Instagram. And we can
be sure that nobody Photoshopped the head of their weakling
spawn onto the body of a champion water polo player in order to
fake their way into Berea College, which ranks fourth on our list
of liberal arts colleges. Berea, which has a historical mission of
serving first-generation students from Appalachia, doesn't have
a water polo team-or crew, or sailing, or fencing, or any of the

other rich-people sports that upper-crust families have long used
as the so-called "side door" into coveted schools.
Instead, those families set their sights on the University
of Southern California, which saw the greatest number of employees implicated by the cheating scandal and-perhaps not
coincidentally!-has produced a remarkably diverse collection
of lurid improprieties in recent years. There's the former dean
of the USC medical school, a then-practicing eye surgeon, who
spent many of his hours holed up in hotel rooms smoking meth
with a prostitute. And the dean of the social work school, who
pioneered the creation of a debt-financed $110,000 online social work degree by splitting the profits with a for-profit tech
company; raked in millions; and somehow managed to bankFor more on our rankings and the latest in
higher education reform news, go to the
College Guide section of our website, at
washingtonmonthly.com/2019-college-guide

rupt the department anyway before being implicated in a shady
financial transaction involving the son of a prominent local politician. And the $50 million settlement with a rival school for
lies and misconduct in poaching a star Alzheimer's researcher.
And the campus gynecologist who stands accused of sexually
abusing hundreds of students-crimes the university allegedly
tried to cover up.
These are the kinds of things that happen at an institution
disconnected from authentic purpose, a place where the pursuit
of money and celebrity becomes both means and ends. Because
it's hard to know how good the education is at a given university, college, or program, institutions with branding savvy and
proximity to wealth, fame, and power can ride a self-reinforcing
spiral of price and reputation all the way up near the top of the
U.S. News list, where USC currently sits at number twenty-two,
blocked from further ascension only by universities that figured
out how to play the game first. It's no wonder that people selling
glitzy fantasies in Hollywood and Silicon Valley were attracted to
USC. They saw themselves.
We, however, see a university that, despite a $5.5 billion endowment, graduates fewer than 100 Pell Grant-eligible students
each year and has a substandard commitment to public service.
Washington Monthly

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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