Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 107

performance measure counted for 2.77 percent. We also allocated another 2.77 percent to the unadjusted share of firstgeneration students.

We measured a college's affordability using data from
IPEDS for the average net prices paid by first-time, full-time, instate students with family incomes below $75,000 per year over
the past three years. We focused on these income categories
because of our interest in affordability for students from lowerto middle-income families. Net price counted for 16.66 percent
of the social mobility score.

We also created metrics to measure whether colleges are
setting students up for decently paying jobs. Our first metric
of students' financial success compares the median earnings of
a college's former students (graduates and dropouts alike) 10
years after initial enrollment to predicted earnings based on
the variables used to predict graduation rates as well as two
other factors designed to take colleges' missions and locations
into account. We adjusted for a college's mix of bachelor's degrees awarded, using STEM, education, business, health, social
science, and liberal arts as broad degree categories. We also
adjusted for regional living costs using fair market rent data
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to account for the fact that
$40,000 per year in the rural South goes much farther than
$40,000 per year in the Washington metropolitan area. This adjusted earnings metric is worth 16.66 percent of the social mobility score. The other financial success metric is the student
loan repayment rate, reflecting the percentage of students who
paid down at least $1 in principal within five years of leaving
college and entering repayment. We use the raw repayment
rate for 8.33 percent of the social mobility score and a regression-adjusted repayment rate (using the same predictors as the
graduation rate metric) for another 8.33 percent.

The research score for national universities is based on five
measurements (from the Center for Measuring University Performance and the National Science Foundation): the total amount
of an institution's research spending; the number of science and
engineering PhDs awarded by the university; the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any
subject, relative to the size of the college; the number of faculty receiving prestigious awards, relative to the number of fulltime faculty; and the number of faculty in the National Academies, relative to the number of full-time faculty. For national universities, we weighted each of these five components equally to
determine a college's final score in the category. For liberal arts
colleges, master's universities, and bachelor's colleges, which do
not have extensive doctoral programs, science and engineering
PhDs were excluded and we gave double weight to the proportion of alumni who go on to get PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academies membership were not included in the research
score for these institutions because such data is available for
only a relative handful of these colleges.

We determined the community service score by measuring each college's performance on five different measures. We
judged military service by collecting data on the size of each
college's Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC programs and dividing by the number of students. We similarly measured national
service by dividing the number of alumni currently serving in
the Peace Corps by total enrollment. We used the percentage of
federal work-study grant money spent on community service
projects as a measure of how much colleges prioritize community service; this is based on data provided by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Each of these three
measures was standardized using a three-year rolling average,
except for work study (in which we used the two most recent
years of data available).

We then added an indicator for whether a college provided at least some matching funds for undergraduate students
who had received a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award for
having completed national service. Colleges that awarded at
least some grants to students regardless of area of study received two points, colleges that limited grants to specific undergraduate programs received one point, and colleges that
did not participate or limited awards to only graduate students
received no points.

Finally, we used a measure of voting engagement using
data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) at Tufts University and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Colleges could earn up to six points for fulfilling each of six criteria. They could receive up to two points
for publishing with ALL IN their data from NSLVE's report on
student voting behavior in 2016 or 2018 (one point for each
year). They could receive up to two points for creating an action plan to improve democratic engagement through the ALL
IN Campus Democracy Challenge in 2018 or 2020 (one point for
each year). A college could earn one point for having a student
voter registration rate above 85 percent and making their registration rate available through ALL IN. Colleges could also earn
one point for being currently enrolled in NSLVE.

We compared our rankings to the U.S. Department of Education's list of colleges subject to the most severe level of
heightened cash monitoring, which indicates that a college is
facing significant financial problems or has other serious issues
that need to be addressed. Four colleges-Bacone College in
Oklahoma, Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, Southwestern
Christian University in Oklahoma, and Wiley College in Texas-
were on that list as of March 2020. We kept these colleges in
our rankings, but denoted them with ^ to draw this concern to
readers' attention. Finally, we checked the colleges that topped
our lists as well as a random sample of lower-ranking schools
to see if they had any serious issues that had been exposed in
recent news coverage. No institution had concerns that rose to
the level of us removing them from our rankings. -Eds.
Washington Monthly 107

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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