Who owns washington monthly

October 8, AM. July 30, PM. June 9, AM. April 14, AM. College Guide. November 6, AM. September 17, AM. September 2, AM. August 30, AM. August 4, PM. July 1, AM. June 23, AM. The Monopolized Economy. August 25, AM. July 15, PM. March 24, PM. Should the massive federal assistance have been more targeted? February 3, AM. A good set of rankings is fairly insensitive to changes in the weighting methodology, while the SMI does not answer that question.

I jumped in the fray late in August with my friends at Washington Monthly for our annual college guide and rankings. Last night, the New York Times released its set of rankings focusing on how elite colleges are serving students from lower-income families. We looked at the most selective colleges including many public universities and ranked them using graduation rate, graduation rate performance are they performing as well as we would expect given the students they enroll?

The U. Princeton, which is currently fighting a lawsuit challenging whether the entire university should be considered a nonprofit enterprise, is the top national university on the list, while Williams College in Massachusetts is the top liberal arts college. Northeastern University, which has risen into the top 50 in recent years, is an exception. News rankings. Going forward, the biggest set of rankings for the rest of the fall will be the new college football rankings—as the Bowl Championship Series rankings have been replaced by a person committee.

And no, Bob Morse from U. News is not a member, although Condoleezza Rice is. That might be worth considering as a tiebreaker if the playoff committee gets deadlocked solely using on-field performance. They could also use the Washington Monthly rankings, but Minnesota has a better chance of winning a Rose Bowl before that happens.

That is supposed to come out this fall , as well. Colleges are assigned scores based on student loan default rates, graduation rates, graduation rate performance, the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, and the net price of attendance. I received an interesting piece of criticism regarding the list by Sara Goldrick-Rab , professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and my dissertation chair in graduate school.

Her critique noted that the size of the school and the type of admissions standards are missing from the rankings. She wrote:. So what? Why is that something we need to laud at the policy level? I used undergraduate enrollment data from the fall semesters of , , , and from IPEDS for both the colleges in the Affordable Elite list and 2, public and private nonprofit four-year colleges not on the list. I calculated the percentage change between each year and for the selective colleges on the Affordable Elite list and the other less-selective colleges to get an idea of whether selective colleges are curtailing enrollment.

This means that enrollment growth may be overstated. Thanks to Ben Wildavsky for leading me to investigate this point. The median Affordable Elite college enrolled 3, students in , compared to 1, students at the median less-selective college.

The percentage change at the median college between each year and is below:. So, as a whole, less-selective colleges are growing at a more rapid pace than the ones on the Affordable Elite list. But do higher-ranked elite colleges grow faster? The scatterplot below suggests not really—with a correlation of But some elite colleges have grown. The top ten colleges in the Affordable Elite list have the following growth rates:. Public colleges have generally grown slightly faster than private colleges the UC colleges are a prime example , but there is substantial variation in their growth.

Much of the discussion at the recent technical symposium was about who should be the key audience: colleges for accountability purposes or students for informational purposes.

The determination of what the audience should be will likely influence what the ratings should look like. My research primarily focuses on institutional accountability, and I think that the federal government should focus on that as the goal of PIRS.

I said as much in my presentation earlier this month. The student information perspective is much trickier in my view. I was quoted in an article in Politico this morning regarding PIRS and what can be learned from existing rankings systems.

In that article, I expressed similar sentiments, although in a less elegant way. I certainly hope that more than six students use the Washington Monthly rankings to inform their college choice sets, but I do not harbor grand expectations that students will suddenly choose to use our rankings over U. However, the influence of the rankings on colleges has the potential to help a large number of students through changing institutional priorities.

I can always tell when a piece about college rankings makes an appearance in the general media. A list of the top ten value colleges across numerous criteria can be found here.

When I talk with institutional researchers or journalists, my answer is straightforward. To look better on a bang-for-the-buck list, colleges have to either increase their bang higher graduation rates and lower default rates, for example or lower their buck with a lower net price of attendance. Our latest forms can be viewed here. Please contact David Greene at or D. Please support this website by adding us to your whitelist in your ad blocker. Ads are what helps us bring you premium content!

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