Inside American Education (18 page)

For any given individual, one of these institutions may be far preferable to the other, but the reverse may be equally true for the next individual. If a higher ranking means simply that the most highly qualified student can find a greater challenge or a better opportunity to develop his talents to the fullest at a given place, then such rankings may be meaningful. But, even in this limited sense, many rankings are meaningless—and therefore dangerously misleading.

Some kinds of rankings make sense because they are based on personal knowledge and experience with respect to the students, the faculty, or the facilities of various institutions. Graduate deans ranking the quality of students their institutions have received over the years from particular colleges have this kind of knowledge and experience to draw on. But college presidents trying to guess what quality of education goes on at competing institutions have no such access to the facts. As the president of Middlebury College wrote, in response to a questionnaire from
U.S. News & World Report:

The underlying premise of your survey is that college and university presidents have special knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of most other institutions. I seriously doubt that any of us had anything more than a superficial knowledge of most other campuses. We simply cannot answer your questions with any degree of authority.
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At the graduate school level, the story is different. Professors at leading institutions become familiar with each other’s publications in scholarly journals and books, and hire each other’s graduate students as new faculty members, so that they are well aware where the best work is being done in their respective
fields and which institutions’ new Ph.D.s are the best trained. Here too, rankings based on professional knowledge often differ from generalized “prestige.” Among graduate departments of philosophy, for example, the University of Pittsburgh was ranked third in the nation. In mathematics, New York University outranked most of the Ivy League, and in chemical engineering the University of Delaware outranked Princeton.
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In ranking educational institutions, as elsewhere, there is a vast difference between expertise and gossip—even quantified gossip.

The more “scientific” or formula-ridden the college rankings are, the more remote they are from conveying meaningful information on the education of undergraduates.
America’s Best Colleges
, which admits that its choices are “ranked according to a formula,”
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is the worst offender. When it ranks the University of California at Berkeley 13th among the nation’s universities, that is surely an unlucky choice. Does this seriously mean that there are only a dozen universities in the United States where a student can get a better undergraduate education than at Berkeley? Even the worst pessimist does not believe that, for Berkeley is notorious for its mass, impersonal education, its many classes taught by hundreds of teaching assistants, often unable to speak fluent English, and for bureaucratic and other obstacles to getting a decent education.

Although Berkeley is one of the leading Ph.D.-granting institutions in the country, both quantitatively and qualitatively, a smaller proportion of its own undergraduates go on to receive Ph.D.s than do the alumni of dozens of other institutions, including many small colleges like Wabash, Eckerd, Kalamazoo, and Occidental. Among universities as well, Berkeley is nowhere near the top when it comes to sending its own undergraduates on to receive Ph.D.s. In fact, Berkeley falls behind four other institutions in the University of California system (U.C. San Diego, Irvine, Riverside, and Santa Cruz) in that regard.
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Berkeley is the flagship of the University of California system, in terms of world-class research prestige, but virtually no one believes its undergraduate education is top-notch.

It is not that alumni Ph.D.s are the only or always best indicator of the quality of undergraduate education. But
America’s Best Colleges
has no real measure of the quality of undergraduate education. Its formula gauges faculty quality by such
things as average faculty salary—almost certainly more a reflection of research than teaching at Berkeley—and by studentfaculty ratios,
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even though many of the faculty counted in these ratios never go near an undergraduate. Like so many formula-ridden approaches which affect a “scientific” air,
America’s Best Colleges
inadvertently betrays the ignorance behind its pretensions—in this case, by misusing repeatedly the simple statistical concept of “percentile.”
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This is typical of the pseudo-precision and pseudo-objectivity of these rankings.

A more insidious problem is that the subjective rankings of institutions by college administrators reward institutions which have done something to bring themselves to the attention of administrators elsewhere. High-quality education is far less likely to do that than some “innovative” gimmick that gets media mention—“interdisciplinary” freshman courses (virtually a contradiction in terms) at Amherst
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or a community service requirement for graduation at Wittenberg,
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for example. The 1988 edition of
America’s Best Colleges
itself characterizes “innovation” as the “answer to obscurity”
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—which is not to say that it is the measure of quality. If you cannot measure quality, the next best thing is to avoid pretending that you can.
America’s Best Colleges
is only the worst offender in this respect, but by no means the only offender.

One of the common practices in a number of college guides is to rank colleges by their “selectivity”—defined as the percentage of applicants accepted for admissions. But if college
A
attracts a large number of mediocre applicants and college
B
attracts a smaller number of well-qualified applicants, then college
A
may end up accepting a smaller percentage of its applicants—thereby looking statistically more “selective.” Such a statistic would be completely misleading, both as to institutional quality and as to any given individual’s probabilities of being accepted at the two schools. Moreover, where college
A
is more widely known, and college
B
has a better reputation among fewer people, to make statistical “selectivity” a factor in ranking them is to perpetuate a public misperception. Some colleges may even deliberately encourage applications from students who have no realistic prospect of being admitted, in order to be able to have a high percentage of rejections and thus be rated more “selective” by college guides.
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None of this means that college guides in general are worthless. On the contrary, many guides are very valuable—and especially so when they do
not
attempt pseudo-scientific rankings, but instead sketch something of the character and thrust of particular institutions, so that a given individual can determine which places would represent a match or a mismatch with that individual’s own aspirations, ability, and personality. Books like
The Fiske Guide to College, The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, or The National Review College Guide
serve this important purpose.

Larger guides containing compilations of numerous institutional statistics—percentage of students who receive financial aid, or who go on to postgraduate education, percentage of faculty with Ph.D.s, percentage of students graduating in which fields—can also be useful, depending on the relevance of the particular statistics presented. The
Comparative Guide to American Colleges
or
The College Handbook
are among the more useful of these kinds of guides. Finally, there are those which do not focus on individual institutions but instead give an overview of the academic world, as an introduction to the whole process of college selection and the considerations to take into account.
Choosing a College and Looking Beyond the Ivy League
are these kinds of foundation books.

It is no more necessary, or possible, to rank these different kinds of books than to rank different kinds of colleges. The various kinds of guides are complementary and, even for a given kind of guide, both multiple opinions and even multiple statistics need to be checked against one another. All can be useful in getting beyond the myths and misinformation which abound on academic institutions.

Tuition and “Costs”

The average tuition at American colleges and universities rose every year throughout the decade of the 1980s, at a rate much higher than the general rate of inflation in the economy.
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Private colleges have led the way, charging not only the highest tuitions but also taking a growing percentage of family income. In academic year 1976-77, the average tuition at private fouryear colleges was less than 17 percent of median family income
but, by academic year 1987-88, their tuition was more than 22 percent of median family income.
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By academic year 199091, there were 255 private colleges where tuition alone was $10,000 per year or more.
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By no means were these all distinguished institutions.

Mitigating the full impact of these charges were (1) the widespread availability of financial aid, (2) the fact that most private colleges charged less than $8,000,
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and (3) the fact that most students attended public institutions.
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Nevertheless, the sums which had to be paid represented serious sacrifices for many families, especially since travel costs, clothing, increasingly expensive textbooks, and other incidental expenses had to be paid for, in addition to charges for tuition, room, and board. The financial drain of all this requires some families to save up for college beforehand or to incur large debts to be repaid long after their son or daughter has graduated. Dartmouth, for example, is not unique in listing in its admissions and financial aid bulletin the availability of home equity loans which permit parents “to tap up to 80% of the equity in their homes as an educational resource.”
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College and university officials have often responded to complaints about rapidly rising tuition with claims that rising costs have made these increases necessary. Like so much that is said by educational institutions, this claim sounds plausible at first, especially when backed up by statistics, but ultimately it cannot stand up under scrutiny. Even if not a single price except tuition had changed anywhere in the entire economy, “costs” would still have risen, as “costs” are defined in academic discussions.

Whatever colleges and universities choose to spend their money on is called a “cost.” If they hire more administrators, or build more buildings to house them, or send the college president on more junkets, these are all additional costs. If they hire more research assistants for the faculty or more secretaries for the administrators, these are all costs. Doing more research, raising salaries, inviting more high-priced speakers to campus and many other things also increase costs. What colleges and universities seek to insinuate—misleadingly—by saying that costs have gone up is that the cost of doing what they have always done is rising, necessitating an increase in tuition. But colleges and universities have been greatly expanding what
they do—and, as long as they spend the rising tuition on something, that something will be called a cost. It is a completely circular argument.

Expanding bureaucracies have been one reason for rising costs—or. to put it more directly, it is one of the things on which colleges spend their increased revenues. From 1975 to 1985, for example, while student enrollment nationally rose by less than 10 percent, college professional support staffs increased by more than 60 percent. (By professional support staff is meant people whose jobs require degrees but who do not teach students.)
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At Stanford University, for example, the president, vice presidents, and their staffs all added up to 47 people in 1977, but this increased to 83 people by 1988.
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Colleges and universities have also created new campuses and student centers overseas. Stanford opened overseas student centers in Italy and France in 1960, in Spain in 1968, Germany in 1975, England in 1984, Poland in 1986, Japan in 1989, and Chile in 1990.
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Nor are overseas campuses or student centers limited to a handful of elite institutions. Innumerable colleges have them, either singly or collectively in consortium arrangements.
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The University of Evansville, for example, has its own 55-acre campus in England and the University of Dallas has its own campus in Rome.

At the University of South Carolina, the president has spent as much as $879 a night for his hotel rooms while travelling and $7,000 in one year for chauffeur services. The university has also paid $350,000 in travel and salary to the widow of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, for teaching one class a week for three semesters.
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All of these are “costs.” A federal investigation of “costs” which Stanford University charged against government research grants turned up $3,000 for a cedar-lined chest and $2,000 a month for flower arrangements, both at the home of Stanford President Donald Kennedy, as well as more than $180,000 charged as depreciation on a yacht privately donated to the university’s athletic department.
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The taxpayers were also charged for part of the cost of a $17,500 wedding reception when Mr. Kennedy remarried in 1987.
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