The post 2016 College Rankings appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Back then, U.S. News & World Report was the only game in town. Every year, the newsmagazine would rate the nation’s institutions of higher learning on measures of wealth, fame, and exclusivity, then publish the results as a list of “best” colleges.

In response, colleges tried to claw their way up the U.S. News ladder by raising prices and excluding all but the most privileged students—exactly the opposite of what a nation struggling to keep higher education affordable for an increasingly diverse student population actually needed.

So we gathered the best available data and ranked colleges not on what they did for themselves, but on what they did for their country. Our method had three pillars: social mobility, research, and service. Colleges that enrolled many low-income students and helped them graduate did well on our rankings, regardless of how famous they were. So did universities producing the next generation of scientists and PhDs, and those that built an ethos of public obligation by sending graduates into service.

But from the beginning, we acknowledged that the U.S. News rankings weren’t flawed simply because heaping compliments on Harvard and Princeton is a great way to sell guidebooks for $9.95 at airport newsstands. (Although that was most of the reason.) U.S. News also relied on “input” measures like freshman SAT scores and class-size ratios because there was no way to measure outcomes of higher education, like how much students learned in school and whether they got good jobs after graduation. Those numbers didn’t exist—or if they did, colleges wouldn’t release them.

We have devoted a sizable portion of the in-depth journalism that accompanies each new Washington Monthly College Guide to exploring and advocating for exactly this kind of data. And we’re pleased to report that it worked: last year, the Obama administration released a trove of new outcomes information for every college and university in America. For the first time, we know how much students earn ten years after enrolling at a given college and how likely they are to be paying down the principal on their loans. The new data also included new perspectives on college opportunity, including the percentage of first-generation students at each college.

We incorporated all of this new information, and more, into this year’s rankings, marking the single-biggest change in our methodology to date. You can find the 2016 ranking of national universities here and a detailed description of the methodology here.

Some of the results were surprising. Colleges we once ranked as mediocre rose to the upper reaches. Others that we had long seen as stellar dropped down, sometimes drastically.

But on the whole, the new rankings bring the central problem facing American higher education into even sharper focus. It is far too easy for colleges to garner undeserved reputations for excellence by hiking tuition, burdening students with loans, and spending the money on things that have little to do with educational excellence. Meanwhile, colleges that are authentically committed to service and social mobility get far too little recognition or reward.

Here are some highlights of what we found:

Public Trust

The U.S. News national university rankings are dominated by private institutions that are free to pick and choose from among high school valedictorians and wealthy legacies. In fact, last year, only one public university, the University of California, Berkeley, cracked U.S. News’s top twenty. On our rankings, public universities, which combine economic diversity with service and a commitment to knowledge production and research, have always done much better. That remains the case, with the majority of our top twenty national universities coming from the public sector, including the University of California, San Diego, Texas A&M, and Utah State University, schools that rate nowhere near the top at U.S. News.

Adding new data elements to our rankings did, however, elevate a group of elite private universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, which now comprise our top three. This shows that with enough money, it’s possible to be famous and exclusive and contribute to social mobility and research. (Those three universities possess $73 billion in combined endowment assets, representing more than 10 percent of the total for every university in America.) But this model provides few lessons for improving collegiate opportunity writ large. It is, by definition, limited to a tiny fraction of students, the victors in an increasingly winner-takes-all society. Indeed, even many elite schools with considerable means still fail to measure up on our rankings. Columbia, Northwestern, and Washington University in St. Louis, which rank number four, twelve, and fifteen, respectively, on the U.S. News list, come in at number twenty-four, forty, and ninety-nine in our rankings.

A more instructive example is California State, Fresno, ranked twenty-fifth on our list. Half of all undergrads there are first-generation students, and the majority have income low enough to qualify for a federal Pell Grant. Cal State–Fresno has a higher graduation rate than is typical, given those demographics, and a highly affordable net price for lower- and moderate-income students (calculated as tuition and fees minus grants and scholarships) of only $5,367 per year. Its students earn $3,600 more per year ten years after starting school than our statistical models predict, and also outperform peer institutions when it comes to students paying down the principal on their loans. And Cal State–Fresno spends 59 percent of its federal work-study funds on public service—the single-highest percentage of any national university in the country.

Texas Woman’s University, located outside Dallas–Fort Worth, doesn’t produce much research, because it isn’t a research institution. And its service numbers could be better. But it excels at the task that students and parents care most about: helping graduates get a foothold in the middle class. Based on demographics and student majors, students from TWU (originally founded by the state legislature as the Girls Industrial College) should earn less than $34,000 per year at the ten-year mark. They actually earn $45,000 per year. TWU is highly focused on training students in fields like kinesiology, business administration, child development, and, most prominently, nursing. Colleges like TWU are the backbone of America’s modern system of career development, helping an economically and racially diverse student population get good jobs for an affordable price.

Mercer University in Georgia, ranked thirty-seventh on our list, is a long-established private institution with a solid graduation rate and academic profile of incoming freshmen. But given those numbers, Mercer enrolls many more low-income and first-generation students than is typical, earnings are robust, and students are paying their loans back at an unusually high rate. Mercer also sends substantial numbers of graduates into ROTC and the Peace Corps, and reports a high level of community and staff participation in public service.

Universities like Cal State–Fresno, Texas Woman’s, and Mercer never show up on conventional “best college” rankings. They aren’t the most exclusive, and they don’t have football teams playing on New Year’s Day. Yet in relative anonymity, they are achieving the goal politicians and pundits say is vital: affordable, high-quality college education.

Then there are the colleges doing exactly the opposite.

Hofstra University president Stuart Rabinowitz earns more than $1 million per year. The university has a comfortable role in the greater New York City metropolitan area, enrolling students with an average SAT score near 1,200. Its published tuition of $40,460 is lower than some other private schools. U.S. News puts Hofstra in the middle of the pack, at 135th, a solid safety school for aspirants to NYU.

But our rankings suggest that’s pretty much all there is to Hofstra. It is home to few faculty who have been inducted into the National Academies or been similarly recognized at the top of their field. It conducts very little scientific research, and its graduates are relatively unlikely to go on to earn PhDs. Its graduation rate is below par, and it enrolls relatively few low-income and first-generation students—perhaps because it charges students from households earning less than $75,000 per year a whopping net price of $28,865, one of the very highest rates nationwide. Employment results are par for the course, loan repayment rates somewhat worse. Hofstra is doing okay for itself. It is doing little for anyone else. We rank it 297th out of 303 national universities.

The University of Miami’s football program has gone through several cycles of scandal and glory over the decades. What’s constant is the university’s high tuition prices and an anemic commitment to economic opportunity. Fewer than one in five Miami students are from low-income families, with similar proportions among first-generation students, and those who do attend are charged nearly $25,000 in tuition per year. Yet after college, Miami students make almost $9,000 less per year than their demographics and student majors predict, among the ten worst disparities nationwide.

Catholic University’s spiritual commitment to aiding the poor seems to stop at the admissions office door. Only 13 percent of its students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 16 percent are first-generation college-goers, one of the worst numbers nationwide.

Some national universities have fallen in our rankings from previous years, yet still stand out for their successes. The University of Texas at El Paso remains in our top third, because, as in years past, it enrolls many low-income students and charges affordable prices while making considerable investments in service and research. UTEP’s Achilles’ heel is the new loan repayment rate measure, which shows that nearly a quarter of students who borrow money to go there fail to pay down even $1 in principal on their loans five years after leaving school. UTEP administrators may need to invest in counseling and outreach to bring their ranking back up. Changes to the federal Pell Grant program that give nontraditional students aid to pay for summer semesters could help increase graduation rates at UTEP (and elsewhere), reducing debt and improving repayment rates.

And then there’s our bottom-ranked national university, Texas Southern, which last made national news nearly a decade ago when its former president pleaded no contest to criminal charges of misappropriating university funds. As journalists noted at the time, Texas Southern was arguably “created to fail” as a means of preventing desegregation. Unfortunately for its students, it continues to live this legacy, with a 15 percent graduation rate—far worse than other universities with similar student populations—relatively high prices, and a staggering 56 percent of borrowers failing to pay down the principal on their loans. As Washington Monthly has shown in previous in-depth investigations, too many “dropout factory” colleges are built to fail, but don’t stop enrolling tens of thousands of vulnerable students, year after year.

Liberal Values

Our new ranking of liberal arts colleges follows a pattern similar to national universities. Berea College tops this year’s list, due to its steadfast commitment to providing a free liberal arts education to first-generation and low-income students in Appalachia. This year’s candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have promised huge new federal subsidies to students attending public colleges and universities. Yet those plans leave out colleges like Berea, which arguably do far more to advance the public interest than selective public universities that skew toward the children of wealth and privilege.

Washington and Lee University in Virginia vaulted all the way to seventh on our liberal arts college ranking, on the strength of its affordable tuition and its outstanding earning results—students earned $18,000 more per year than our statistical models predicted. Ripon College in Wisconsin outperforms its peers in enrolling first-generation and Pell students, helping them graduate, and sending them successfully into the labor market. Tougaloo College, a historically black institution in Mississippi, continues to outperform in graduating an overwhelmingly low-income student population while keeping prices affordable—although it, too, has a serious problem with students being unable to pay down their loans.

Agnes Scott College, an all-women’s institution in Georgia, jumped twenty-one places in the rankings this year in part due to superior earnings results, joining Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and other women’s colleges that have historically ranked highly on our measures of service and social obligation. Davidson College, a highly selective institution in North Carolina with a strong humanities tradition, rose to number twelve by virtue of strong earning and loan repayment rates, accompanied by generous financial aid policies for lower- and middle-income students.

On the down side, Bennington College, ranked 227 out of 239, is probably still a good place to matriculate if you want to write, or live in, a book like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. But for everyone else, it offers stingy financial aid for needy students, below-par earnings and graduation rates, and comparatively little in the way of research and service.

Regional Pride

National universities and liberal arts colleges dominate mass media coverage of higher education, but they don’t include the hundreds of regional and master’s-granting universities that collectively enroll millions of students every year. Among the best of them, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, shows that a traditional Great Books–focused liberal arts curriculum doesn’t necessarily lead to living in your parents’ basement at age twenty-five; earnings there rate comparably to similar schools, and a higher percentage of St. John’s graduates go on to earn PhDs than any master’s university nationwide. (Although this may lead to living in your parents’ basement when you’re thirty-five.) The Johnnies also enter the Peace Corps in high numbers.

California State campuses are located throughout the upper ranks of our master’s university rankings. They vary in how successfully they help students graduate and pay back loans, but their common thread is a high population of Pell-eligible students and unusually low net prices for students who aren’t well-to-do—the legacy of California’s historical commitment to accessible higher education, one that remains threatened by economic and budgetary pressures in the Golden State.

The College of the Ozarks, a Christian liberal arts school in Missouri that offers free tuition to full-time students in exchange for work and service commitments (its trademarked nickname is “Hard Work U”), rose to number two on our ranking of baccalaureate colleges. The majority of undergrads there qualify for Pell Grants, nearly two-thirds graduate within six years, and their loan repayment rates are stellar because nobody has loans to begin with. Number five–ranked Calvin College, a Christian Reformed Church institution in Grand Rapids, Michigan, combines high loan repayment rates with an academically minded research focus, and it’s one of the few colleges to simultaneously excel in sending graduates into PhD programs, ROTC, and the Peace Corps.

Future Rankings

College rankings are only as good as the data that form them. To rank a college based on what happens to its students after leaving school is to assert that colleges bear responsibility for events that are partly outside their control. Public institutions can be hostage to the whims of elected officials. When we celebrate or criticize an institution, we are really describing a confluence of individual actions, organizational decisions, and societal trends.

But the great benefit of ranking the vast and diverse population of American colleges is that the imperfections and limitations of the data have a tendency to balance themselves out, revealing a critical truth: for any category of institution, serving any kind of student, there are colleges out there that truly stand out on every measure, or at least most of them, compared to other, similar schools. When it comes to serving their country, they simply do better, year in and year out, at one of the most vital and sacred responsibilities any public-minded institution can bear.

Which is why we will continue to hunt and advocate for more information about the many ways colleges do or don’t succeed. And it’s why we will use that information, fairly and publicly, for the benefit of all.

The post Introduction: A Different Kind of College Ranking appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Go to almost any college website and look at the PR photos of the students. The first thing you’ll probably notice is their diversity: white, black, Latino, Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern, all the colors of the rainbow. What you might not notice, at least at first, is what they all have in common: their age, late teens and early twenties. The reason you might not notice this is that it seems natural: in our mind’s eye, colleges are places filled with fresh-faced young people who recently graduated high school.

But in the real world, that’s no longer the case. More than 40 percent of the 20.2 million students attending American colleges and universities are adults, defined as twenty-five years old or older. This is not a new trend, and colleges surely know all about it. Yet the fact that the PR photos on their websites don’t reflect that reality indicates just how behind the curve most of them are in adapting and catering to this huge and growing demographic.

Unlike traditional undergrads, adult learners tend to juggle full-time jobs and family responsibilities, and so they have trouble fitting daytime classes into their schedules. Yet few colleges offer anywhere near enough evening, weekend, and online classes to complete a degree, or—banish the thought—provide on-campus daycare. Many adult learners are returning students who have earned college credits elsewhere. Yet too often, colleges won’t accept a lot of those credits, forcing adult students to spend more time and money to get their degrees. Adult learners typically have learned-on-the-job knowledge of the subject they’re hoping to major in—a bookkeeper studying accounting, for instance. But precious few colleges offer tests that can let these students earn college credit for that knowledge—“prior learning assessments,” in higher ed speak.

The failure of so many colleges and universities to meet the needs of adult learners hurts us all. It diminishes upward mobility, robs the economy of needed skills, and slows our efforts to catch up with other countries in the percentage of our population with post-secondary credentials.

And it’s not just the higher education system that has failed to adapt to the needs of adult learners. So has the press. The ever-growing number of publications that rate and rank American colleges and universities—U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Money, Barron’s, Fiske, the Princeton Review, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, the New York Times, the Times of London Educational Supplement—all focus mainly on high school students and their families. None rank colleges based on which serve adult students best.

Until now. In this issue, we inaugurate our first-ever rankings of the best colleges for adult learners. To create them, we pulled data from two federal government sources: the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) survey and the department’s new College Scorecard database, released last fall. We also are grateful to have been given key results from the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges. We combined all these numbers into seven general measures of colleges’ openness and responsiveness to adult students and to how well those students fared once they left. Our rankings for four-year schools can be found here, for two-year schools here. Our detailed methodology is here.

At the top of our list of four-year schools is San Francisco’s Golden Gate University. This 110-year-old institution, which started as a night law school, has long been devoted to the needs of adult learners. That devotion shows up in one of our measures: fully 88 percent of Golden Gate’s students are adults (the higher that percentage, the higher a school scores on our rankings). Golden Gate also does well on three metrics of adult student friendliness: “ease of transfer” (how open a school is, for instance, to accepting credits earned at other colleges, and whether it lets adults enroll without having to take tests like the SAT); “flexibility of programs” (whether it offers things like weekend and evening classes and prior learning assessments); and “services for adults” (financial aid counseling, on-campus daycare, job placement, specialized services for military veterans, and so on). Golden Gate does poorly on one metric, tuition and fees (at $14,640 per year, it’s relatively expensive), and middling on another, whether adult students are able to pay back at least some of the principal on their loans five years after leaving college. But it partially makes up for that in another important measure: earnings. The mean income of adult students ten years after they enter Golden Gate University is $73,166, the eighteenth highest of the 571 four-year schools we looked at.

Several other four-year colleges that traditionally focus on adult learners also do well on our rankings. They include Regis University, a private nonprofit in Colorado (number twenty-two); Charter Oak State College in Connecticut (twenty-eight), University of Maryland’s University College (fifty-three), and the State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College (sixty-three). So do a smattering of highly regarded state flagships, like the University of Iowa (thirteen) and Indiana University Bloomington (fifty-seven).

Equally instructive are the schools that don’t make the list. No for-profit colleges score in the top 100—though one, Walden University in Minnesota, a private institution organized as a “public benefit corporation,” clocks in at number nineteen. Also absent are Ivy League colleges, or indeed any of the private elite institutions that crowd the top of U.S. News’s rankings. Few of these institutions even made it into the 571 schools we looked at. That is because they enroll too few adult students for the federal government to provide statistically reliable loan repayment and earnings data. For the most part, these elite schools simply aren’t in the business of educating adults.

Instead, our top 100 four-year list is dominated by the kinds of workaday schools—Montana State University Billings (number fifteen), University of Missouri–Kansas City (number twenty)—that U.S. News tends to ignore. But according to our data, they deserve three cheers for providing affordable, career-enhancing college educations to America’s working adult students.

Community colleges seldom enjoy national reputations. One that does, Miami Dade College in Florida, the second-largest institution of higher education in the country, comes in at number seventy-nine on our ranking of the 100 best two-year schools. Mostly, though, the colleges on our two-year list are largely unknown outside their communities but warrant national recognition for delivering big-time for adult learners. Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota (number seven) garnered the highest scores possible on our ease of transfer and flexibility measures. And students at number one–ranked Weber State University in Utah, which grants mostly two-year degrees, earn an impressive $50,867 on average ten years after enrolling in college—the sixth-highest income among the 1,171 community colleges we looked at.

Every year, millions of adult Americans make the decision to go back to college to earn the degrees they need to advance their lives. We hope these rankings will help them pick colleges where they have the best chance of achieving their goals. Just as important, we hope that by honoring colleges that do right by adult students, we’ll spur more colleges to do the same.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Adult Learners appeared first on Washington Monthly.

We began with the 7,687 postsecondary institutions listed in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as being active in the 2014–15 academic year. We then limited the sample to all colleges with a Carnegie basic classification in 2015 of between 1 and 23, excluding many certificate-granting institutions as well as special-focus institutions such as medical schools or rabbinical programs. We dropped fifty-eight colleges for being outside the fifty states and Washington, D.C., dropped seven colleges for closing or merging since 2014–15, dropped four colleges for not participating in any federal financial aid programs, and dropped the five service academies to be consistent with the main rankings. An additional 130 colleges were excluded for having fewer than 100 students in any of the last three years in which they were open.

The next sample restriction was to exclude colleges that did not have data on all of the outcome measures. Another 513 colleges were dropped for not participating in the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges, which is key in our rankings. Fifteen colleges did not have data on the percent of adult students, 315 colleges did not have data on average earnings of independent students, and we excluded 808 colleges that participated in the federal student loan program but did not report a separate repayment rate for independent students. As we used the percentage of adult students as one of our metrics, colleges with insufficient numbers of independent students to have a separate repayment rate for independent students were unlikely to score highly in this ranking anyway. For twenty colleges that served at least 75 percent adult students and did not have separate data on earnings or repayment rates for independent students, we instead used data for all students. Our resulting sample is 1,749 colleges, of which 571 are considered four-year colleges (based on Carnegie classification and whether they awarded more bachelor’s degrees than certificates or associate’s degrees) and 1,178 are two-year colleges. As a final precaution to weed out especially questionable colleges, we cross-checked all our rankings with the Department of Education’s level-two Heightened Cash Monitoring List. We then randomly selected five schools on each of the two lists, checked their status on the less severe level-one Heightened Cash Monitoring List, verified their accreditation, and searched through local and national news clips over the past year for signs of problems.

We used the following seven metrics in constructing our inaugural rankings for adult students:

(1) Ease of transfer/enrollment. This is designed to reflect how easy it is for adult students to either initially enroll or transfer in a given college. It includes data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges on whether there is an orientation program for transfer students, whether transcript review is available prior to admission, whether students can transfer in at an upper level (seniors for four-year colleges and sophomores for two-year colleges), whether a college is test-optional for adult students or open admission (four-year colleges only), and whether a transfer advisor is available. Four-year colleges could score up to five points on this metric, while two-year colleges could score up to four points.

(2) Flexibility of programs. This metric considers whether colleges are flexible enough to meet the needs of adult students, and again is based on IPEDS and College Board data. Colleges receive a point if they allow credits to be earned by life experience/prior learning assessment, if credits can be earned via examination, if accelerated programs are available, if at least some distance programs are available, if independent study classes are available, if student-designed majors are allowed, if weekend and/or evening classes are offered, if academic support is available after 6 p.m., or if academic support is available on weekends. Colleges could earn a maximum of nine points on this metric.

(3) Services available for adult students. This is based on IPEDS and College Board data and reflects whether a college offers services that adult students are most likely to use. Colleges receive a point if they offer general services for adult students, financial aid counseling, on-campus daycare, counseling services, job placement services, or veterans’ services. Colleges could earn at most six points on this metric.

(4) The percent of adult students (age 25+) at the college. This measure is from IPEDS and represents the percentage of undergraduate students who are age twenty-five or older, which is the age at which students are automatically considered as independent from their parents for financial aid purposes. We used this measure instead of the percentage of independent students from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard due to there being no missing data on this measure and the extremely strong correlation between the two measures.

(5) Mean earnings of adult students ten years after entering college. Here, we used newly released data from the College Scorecard to examine what the average earnings were for independent students a decade after they entered college regardless of whether they graduated or dropped out. (Independent students include all adult students, as well as younger students who are veterans or have children of their own—people who benefit from additional flexibility.) We would ideally like to compare this to students’ earnings before they entered (or reentered) college, but this is still a big 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 Klein-Collins, 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.

The post A Note on Methodology: Best Colleges For Adult Learners appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the past four years, we’ve ranked America’s colleges and universities based on their “Bang for the Buck”—that is, the extent to which they charge students who aren’t rich a reasonable price for quality education that will advance them in their careers. Last fall, the Obama administration made our job a lot easier. It released a new data set, the “College Scorecard,” that shows, for the first time, how much students earn ten years after enrolling at a given college and whether they’re paying down at least some of the loan principal. It also reveals the percent of first-generation students each college enrolls, a key measure of its commitment to opportunity. We incorporated all this new data, and more, into our 2016 Best Bang for the Buck rankings, which are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, which can be found here; the methodology is explained here.)

The top Best Bang for the Buck colleges in each of our five regions reflect a diverse group of institutions. Harvard University (tops in the Northeast) does a relatively good job for an elite college in enrolling lower-income and first-generation students, and getting into Harvard is generally a ticket to economic success. Berea College (South) and College of the Ozarks (Midwest) are familiar to many in the higher education world for being tuition-free colleges that primarily serve low-income students. Cal State–Bakersfield is best in the West for serving large numbers of modest-income and first-generation students at a low price, and setting them up to earn, ten years after enrolling, $49,800 a year, over $10,000 more than do former students from other colleges who have similar backgrounds. The University of Mount Olive in North Carolina heads our Southeast list on the strength of a low net price of attendance for families making less than $75,000 per year and outperforming its expected values for graduation rates, earnings, and loan repayment.

Across the regions, a few trends stand out. Some elite private colleges (such as Penn, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford) make the top twenty in their regions, but the lists are dominated by lesser-known private colleges and non-flagship public colleges. For example, CUNY Brooklyn College is one spot ahead of Yale in the Northeast and Trinity Washington College edges out Davidson College in the Southeast. University of California and California State University campuses make up nearly half of the top twenty in the West, highlighting the historical commitment of California citizens to their public colleges (even as the number of qualified students far exceeds available capacity).

Prospective students who don’t have money to burn might also want to look at the bottom of our Best Bang lists to see which kinds of colleges they should probably avoid, and why. The University of Tulsa, 197th out of 199 colleges in the South, charges more than $22,000 a year in tuition, even though its students go on to earn almost $10,500 less per year than would be expected considering their backgrounds. If your family income is less that $75,000 a year and you want to enroll at Hampshire College, the respected liberal arts school in Massachusetts, be aware that you’ll pay, on average, $24,000 a year to do so and ten years later will earn $31,900 a year, nearly $8,000 less than had you attended another school, even after taking the mix of majors into account.

Finally, in the future we would love to supplement these rankings with data not just on specific colleges but on different programs within each college. After all, a university that might be a great value for a physics major might not be so good for a communications major. The U.S. Department of Education has indicated that it may include program-level data in future updates to the College Scorecard tool. However, the federal government is years behind states such as Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia in making this important information available to the public—in part due to a congressional ban on student-level data that primarily serves to obscure colleges’ true outcomes.

The post America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges 2016 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last year, we profiled ten college and university presidents who, in our judgment, were doing things differently, and better, than their peers. Instead of using their positions to increase their endowments and recruit a “better” sort of student in order to move their schools up the U.S. News & World Report rankings, these leaders were turning their institutions into laboratories of innovation in a hunt for better ways to deliver higher ed—providing quality degrees at lower cost, getting more students to graduate, and so on. One of those presidents, Michael Sorrell of Paul Quinn College, is the subject of a longer feature in this issue (see Matt Connolly, “Labor of Love”).

But, of course, even the best college presidents, like the most successful company CEOs, aren’t necessarily the ones dreaming up the actual new ideas. Those tend to come from lower down the chain of command—administrators, faculty members, even grad students—or from people outside these institutions, in government, nonprofits, and the private sector.

These front-line innovators don’t always have a lot of power. So when they try to advocate for new and better ways of serving students, they are typically pushing against resistant leadership, indifferent or threatened colleagues, and a general institutional inertia that makes progress painfully slow.

The good news is that the atmosphere for innovation is beginning to change. As more and more students and parents grow frustrated with the rising cost and uncertain quality of a college education; as employers and policymakers bemoan the negative economic effects of a lack of college-educated workers; and as voters turn angry about how the higher education system seems to perpetuate inequality rather than alleviate it, politicians are putting pressure on institutions to improve. Conditions are becoming ripe, in other words, for the innovators to take charge.

One of the best ways we can think of to empower those still struggling to create change is to publicize the work of those who are already succeeding. So we set out to find innovators from all corners of the higher education map. This list isn’t a ranking, and it’s by no means exhaustive. Consider it a snapshot of the various overlapping ways in which creative, passionate people around the country are working to make higher education more accessible, affordable, and effective.

TIM RENICK
Georgia State University

Georgia State, in Atlanta, is a microcosm of the challenges facing higher education in America. The demographics of the university’s more than 30,000 undergraduates have shifted dramatically over the past decade, as Pell Grant–eligible students have risen from about 30 percent to 60 percent of the student body and the ratio of white students to students of color has flipped from 60/40 to 40/60. At the same time, state funding for higher education has declined. A huge, non-elite, non-flagship urban public university, trying to do more with less while serving students from less privileged backgrounds: welcome to higher education in 2016.

Given these shifts, you would expect Georgia State’s academic results to have suffered—after all, research shows a tight negative correlation between a low-income student population and graduation rates. Yet the opposite has happened, thanks to the university’s “Student Success Collaborative,” initiated in 2012 and headed by Renick. (Last year, we wrote about university president Mark Becker.) The initiative, which has become a model for other schools trying to improve student outcomes, encompasses more than a dozen different programs, including pre–freshman year summer sessions, redesigned introductory math curriculum, and micro-grants for students in need of a few hundred bucks to make it through the semester. The centerpiece is the enthusiastic embrace of predictive analytics, which means using historical data to determine the telltale signs of when students are in need of targeted interventions. A student who gets a C in an intro course in her intended major, for example, is statistically very unlikely to graduate. But traditionally, the only feedback she would get would be from the grade itself, which says: “You passed.” Now, through predictive analytics, warning flags like that C grade trigger interventions in which advisers give students the information they need to get back on track. In the last year, for instance, the system has helped 2,000 students who picked the wrong course for their requirements switch into the right one. In the past, they wouldn’t have known about their wasted time and money until after the semester was over. That can mean the difference between graduating and dropping out, since financial aid packages only cover so many credits.

It’s hard to overstate the project’s impact. Georgia State now confers 30 percent more bachelor’s degrees than it did five years ago. The overall graduation percentage has risen from the low 30s to the low 50s. Most remarkably, the racial achievement gap has vanished—in fact, black and Hispanic students now graduate at higher rates than white students, and Georgia State confers more bachelor’s degrees to African Americans than any other school in the country, including historically black colleges.

And, according to Renick, the reforms more than pay for themselves. Each percentage improvement in student retention brings in $3.1 million in gross revenue. That means there’s no excuse for other universities not to do what Georgia State is doing. And many are. Examples include Delaware State University, a struggling public historically black college where chief operating officer Teresa Hardee has put together a leadership team that “completely understands that it’s more financially advantageous for the university to retain students than to lose them,” notes Daniel Greenstein of the Gates Foundation, which is supporting DSU’s predictive analytics efforts.

Renick describes predictive analytics as “simply a way to level the playing field.” Students whose parents or siblings went to college have the benefit of an “invisible support system” that first-generation students lack, which helps them overcome obstacles that are frequently of the university’s own making. Renick sees his efforts as fundamentally about removing those obstacles. “When we began to deal with those problems systematically,” he says, “what we found is a lot of these achievement gaps just evaporated.”

DAVID LAUDE
University of Texas at Austin

UT Austin has long been the pride of the Texas public university system. But in 2011, Laude, a chemistry professor, was assigned to confront its quiet shame: about half of undergrads failed to graduate within four years. Students who stay longer rack up more debt, are less likely to graduate at all, and take up spots that could go to new students. Low-income, minority, and first-generation students, who can least afford not to

graduate on time, are the most at risk. Much of Laude’s work has been focused on precisely that group. A system similar to Georgia State’s predictive analytics flags the students at the greatest statistical risk of not finishing on time. They’re placed in smaller first-year classes and given intensive faculty and peer support; some are awarded a $20,000 scholarship and on-campus internships. According to Laude, these efforts have helped bump at-risk students’ percentage rate of first-year persistence—an obvious factor affecting timely graduation—from the low 80s to the low 90s. This year, the overall four-year graduation rate cracked 60 percent. Based on the numbers so far, the class of 2017, the first cohort to have entered school during the graduation effort, is on track to hit the program’s goal of 70 percent. Laude says the most important innovation has been something difficult to pinpoint: a cultural shift. “This doesn’t necessarily sound all that exciting, because you can’t point to a particular program and say, ‘That’s the program that did it,’ ” he says. “It was, effectively, making jokes about staying on campus for more than four years go away. It stopped being part of what people said in graduation speeches or in orientation. And it was replaced by the steady drumbeat that a four-year graduation was in a student’s best interest.”

CHARLES ISBELL
Georgia Institute of Technology

Much has been made of the fact that universities aren’t producing enough STEM graduates to fill the growing number of technology-based jobs. At the same time, an advanced computer science degree from a traditional on-campus program is unrealistic for millions of would-be students. A top department like Georgia Tech’s, for instance, only has the physical space to enroll a few hundred students a year. And the price tag—about $20,000 per degree for in-state students, about $38,000 for out-of-state—can be prohibitive. Isbell, a professor

and senior associate dean, helped create Georgia Tech’s online master’s in computer science to solve both problems. Produced in partnership with the for-profit ed tech company Udacity, and with funding from AT&T, the online program allows students to get the same degree awarded to on-campus students for the eye-poppingly low average price of about $7,000. Isbell devised the idea along with Zvi Galil, dean of Georgia Tech’s college of computing, and Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of Udacity. Now he both helps oversee the program and teaches an online machine-learning course. What excites him most about the online degree is the fact that it draws thousands of qualified students who, because of price or geography, weren’t applying to the on-campus program. Without the physical constraints of classroom size and teacher availability, a class that traditionally held 300 students can instead reach 3,000. And while the in-person program overwhelmingly attracts students from India and other Asian countries, the online degree enrolls mostly U.S. citizens. “It turns out we’re accessing a whole set of students who can succeed but otherwise would not have the opportunity,” says Isbell, an Atlanta-area native who talks faster than the average New Yorker. He’s not stopping there: recently, he’s been traveling to Kenya to set up partnerships with African universities. His goal? To become, in a few years, “the largest single producer of graduate IT talent in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

DAN PORTERFIELD
Franklin & Marshall College

Can a selective liberal arts college triple its share of low-income students in a few years without sacrificing academic quality? The example of Franklin & Marshall suggests that the answer is yes. Since Porterfield became president in 2011, Pell-eligible students have gone from 5 percent of the student body to 19 percent.

That’s one result of the ambitious Next Generation Initiative, a multipronged effort to boost Franklin & Marshall’s socioeconomic, racial, and geographic diversity. The college has eliminated so-called merit aid, which overwhelmingly goes to students who can afford tuition, and doubled its spending on need-based aid. It hosts a three-week summer prep program for high-achieving, low-income high school seniors from urban charter networks and rural Pennsylvania schools. And each year the school accepts two ten-student cohorts from the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit focused on college access. Porterfield is especially proud that these students are actually improving the academic environment. First-generation students and Pell Grant recipients have the same average grades as the overall student body, and students who get need-based aid are graduating at a higher rate, with higher GPAs, than the school as a whole. The college says it has gotten more selective, not less, since it started the initiative. To Porterfield, that makes it an obvious win-win. “I wish I could tell you that I was facing competition from ten other top schools,” he says. “But the reality is, these students are under-recruited.” Once on campus, they raise the bar for everyone. “Education is one endeavor where everybody wins if you give low-income kids an opportunity.”

LINDA JOHNSRUD
University of Texas at Arlington

A few years ago, when she was provost and vice president for academic affairs in the University of Hawaii system, Linda Johnsrud crunched some numbers and found that students were taking 5.8 years on average to earn a four-year degree. That extra time to graduate, she recognized, imposed considerable costs on those students. It meant more out-of-pocket tuition and living expenses, higher debt burdens, and lower lifetime

income (by delaying their entrance into post-college careers). Perhaps worst of all, it increased the risk that students wouldn’t graduate at all. Upon further examination, Johnsrud found that one of the main reasons students were putting themselves on five- or six-year tracks was that they were taking fewer than fifteen credits per semester, often at their advisers’ encouragement. In 2012, Johnsrud developed an aggressive advertising campaign called “15-to-Finish,” intended to “change the norm to full-time [meaning] 15 credits, not 12,” according to the program’s proposal, and in effect to help students accrue far less debt and actually attain a degree. When 15-to-Finish started, 49 percent of students were completing at least fifteen credits in their freshman year. That number is now 55 percent. Meanwhile, Hawaii’s four-year graduation rate rose from 20 percent in 2012 to 28 percent last year. The campaign was so effective that fifteen states have followed Hawaii’s lead changing financial aid structures to encourage students to up their enrollment intensity.

Johnsrud is now interim vice provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she continues to innovate. Last month she launched TransferUTA, an online portal that not only provides information for two-year students looking to move to four-year schools but also, in partnership with local community colleges, proactively identifies students who are likely to transfer and makes sure they have access to transfer and credit information from the get-go.

LAURIE DODGE
Brandman University

Dodge, vice chancellor of institutional assessment and planning and vice provost at Brandman University, is a leader in helping adult and other nontraditional students get the college degrees they need to advance their careers. Taking advantage of an Obama administration decision allowing federal financial aid to be used for “competency-based education” (CBE), Dodge created new bachelor’s programs that busy, mid-career adult

can complete quickly and without having to commute to campus. Depending on the degree, students must complete fifty-six to sixty-one competencies—online classes taken at students’ own pace, with assessments to show mastery—to earn their degree. Students who already know the material or have already learned the skills involved can test out of these competencies at any point. At $5,400 in annual tuition, and with degrees taking about thirty months to earn, most students can complete the entire program for $13,500 or less, a much cheaper and faster approach than the traditional bachelor’s degree. Brandman’s competency-based program was among the highest performing in the country, according to the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. (Brandman, part of the Chapman University system, only became a separately accredited institution in 2008, so it does not have the ten years of income data necessary to be included in our ranking of America’s Best Colleges for Adult Learners.) As co-chair of the Competency-Based Education Network, a consortium of colleges working on CBE curriculum, Dodge also helps drive experimentation in the field more broadly.

BEN CASTLEMAN
University of Virginia

In 2011, Castleman, then an education doctoral candidate at Harvard, was trying to find a low-cost way to address the problem of “summer melt.” That’s the phenomenon in which high schoolers say they plan to go to college, but fail to follow through during the summer after senior year—when counselors and teachers can’t keep an eye on them. The issue is acute for low-income students, who are less likely to have college-savvy family members to help them with applications, financial aid forms, and so on. It’s a problem

Castleman observed in Providence, Rhode Island, where he worked as a high school teacher and administrator before going to Harvard. Applying principles of behavioral psychology, he realized that to change these students’ actions, it would be necessary to meet them where they are. Where are they? On their phones, of course. So, along with Lindsay Page, a Harvard researcher, Castleman partnered with uAspire, a Boston-based financial counseling nonprofit, to test the effectiveness of text message–based reminders at combating summer melt. They found that kids who lacked college-planning support were significantly more likely to enroll in the fall if they got the texts—at a cost of only seven dollars per student. Since then, Castleman has continued to expand his text-based interventions, which he describes in his 2015 book, The 160-Character Solution. (If predictive analytics is about using data to discern which students need help, Castleman’s work is about using behavioral psychology to figure out what kind of help actually works.) The key is finding organizations that have access to student information and cell phone numbers. This past winter, he partnered with the Common App to reach out to 450,000 low-income students, and this fall, text nudges are going prime-time: Castleman is working with Michelle Obama’s Better Make Room campaign to get millions of high school students signed up.

CANDACE THILLE
Open Learning Initiative
Stanford University

Thille is something of a celebrity in the world of learning science. She’s best known for the online statistics course that she developed in 2007, while leading the Online Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. The OLI designs courses based on learning science and evaluates them according to student performance. The

courses are adaptive, meaning they provide immediate feedback tailored to students’ responses. Studies found that Carnegie Mellon students using the online stats course, with minimal instructor contact, did as well as or better than students in traditional face-to-face classes. That was a major milestone in online education, because it proved that “online” need not be synonymous with “lower quality.” Since then, the results have been matched by other universities using the OLI course. The upshot: colleges and universities can use well-designed online courses to cut costs without sacrificing learning outcomes. And because the OLI’s materials are freely available online, anyone—professors, administrators, or individual students—can use them.

Now running the OLI at Stanford, Thille continues to explore how to make online education more adaptive to individual learners. This fall, she will collaborate on a project at Georgia State to test the effectiveness of “mind-set interventions,” developed with Stanford colleagues Carol Dweck and Geoff Cohen. Working with Ryan Baker at Columbia Teachers College, they are building “affect detectors” into the OLI stats course to determine when students should receive the interventions. Translation: if a student’s performance indicates that her morale is flagging, the course will deliver her a psychological boost. (Research shows that low self-esteem is a major roadblock for disadvantaged students.) Thille is excited about the use of technology to create personalized and adaptive learning systems, but she’s worried about the design of these systems being outsourced to for-profit companies whose proprietary software isn’t transparent or peer reviewed. Thille—who spent eighteen years in the private sector before beginning her academic career—emphasizes that in a university context, researchers, educators, and students are all in the same environment, providing a feedback loop that’s ideal for innovation and improvement. “As institutions of higher education,” Thille says, “we are in a very privileged position.”

AMY LAITINEN
New America

Think of a “typical” college student and what probably comes to mind is an eighteen-year-old freshman living in a dorm. In fact, nearly half of all college students today are adults, most of them studying part-time while juggling work and family responsibilities. In 2011, Amy Laitinen, a former Obama administration education policy adviser then working at a D.C. think tank, was trying to figure out how to get the higher education system to do a better job of meeting the needs of these adult learners. Only a handful of schools at the time were doing so. Excelsior College in New York, for instance, has long built its curriculum around competency-based education. Instead of giving students college credit based on “seat time” in class—the credit hours we all earned in college—students in CBE move at their own pace, typically in online classes, and advance by showing mastery of specific knowledge and skills (“competencies”) on exams designed by subject-matter experts. In addition, students who have already garnered considerable knowledge on the job can convert that knowledge into college credit by taking exams and building portfolios of their prior work that are judged by outside experts—“prior learning assessments” is the term of art. Via CBE and PLA, Excelsior and a few schools like it have shown that it is possible to provide quality degrees to adults at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional degrees.

Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, students can’t get federal financial aid for CBE courses. That’s because federal aid is tied, by statute, to the old credit hour system. There is good reason for this policy: it helps keep unscrupulous diploma mills, where students rarely, if ever, have a chance to interact with professors, away from federal aid dollars. The problem is that it also keeps great programs, like Excelsior’s, out of the federal aid system (and out of the running for our Best Colleges for Adult Learners rankings, which are based on federal aid data). That, in turn, means that very few other schools have followed Excelsior’s lead and developed innovative programs to serve adult students.

While researching this problem in 2011, Laitinen noticed an obscure provision in a 2006 statute allowing for something called “direct assessment.” Lawmakers had added the provision so a politically plugged-in college, Western Governors University, could access federal aid for its competency-based curriculum.

WGU ultimately decided to build its CBE curriculum around the credit hour, so it had never taken advantage of the loophole. But other colleges could, Laitinen reasoned. Indeed, as she later told the Chronicle of Higher Education, direct assessment represents “an entirely different way of awarding federal financial aid.” Laitinen wrote up her discovery in a widely read report for New America and spread the word among her extensive—and at first skeptical—contacts in the federal government and the wider higher ed sector. Discussions she convened between federal regulators and college administrators convinced both sides that the loophole does indeed apply broadly. Since then, a handful of colleges, including Brandman University (see Laurie Dodge profile above), have created CBE-based curricula and are receiving federal financial aid. Hundreds more are looking into doing some form of CBE.

TRISTAN DENLEY
Tennessee Board of Regents

Tennessee has become a national leader in improving remediation (also known as developmental education—non-credit-bearing courses for students deemed academically not ready for college-level work), and Denley has had a lot to do with it. He was provost at Austin Peay State University when, in 2007, that school began to test the effectiveness of a co-requisite model: instead of making students complete multiple semesters of

developmental math and writing before allowing them into college-level courses, a co-requisite model has students do remedial work in addition to, and at the same time as, credit-bearing classes. (Another pioneer of the approach is Peter Adams, formerly of the Community College of Baltimore County.) The experiment was wildly successful, and a few years later, as vice chancellor for academic affairs at the Tennessee Board of Regents, Denley began applying the approach to Tennessee’s community college system. Despite efforts to improve the developmental curriculum, the numbers were abysmal: statewide, 60 percent of incoming community college students were placed in developmental math, English, or both. Only 12 percent of those placed in math remediation finished a credit-bearing math course within an academic year; for English, the number was about 30 percent. In 2014, the Board of Regents launched a co-requisite pilot program enlisting about 2,000 students in the state’s community colleges. The results were so staggering that the very next year, the model was implemented at every community college in the state, for every student in remediation. The expansion has been a wild success. In its first year, 51 percent of co-requisite math students passed their credit-bearing math class in the fall semester—compared to the 12 percent who previously managed that in a full year. In English, the 30 percent number leapt to nearly 60 percent. In fact, more students are now completing credit-bearing classes than previously completed just the remedial courses. And even students who don’t pass their first semester end up earning more credits than they would have under the old model. To Denley, that’s powerful proof of the role students’ mind-set plays in their success or failure. The failure of the old model may have a lot to do with the fact that it told students they didn’t belong at college—and they believed it.

KATIE HERN and MYRA SNELL
California Acceleration Project

One day in 2009, Hern mentioned to Snell that students who took Hern’s one-semester remedial English course at Chabot College were, surprisingly, more likely to graduate than those who took the normal, multi-semester

remedial sequence. Snell, a math professor at Los Medanos College, explained that this was no fluke: it was unintentionally built into the design of remediation. (Chabot and Los Medanos are community colleges.) She made Hern take out a calculator: even if 80 percent of students make it through each course, if you multiply that by three semesters, you’ve lost half the students. “Every layer of remediation was guaranteed to reduce the number of students who moved forward,” Hern recalls realizing. “By taking students that we thought were not prepared for college and putting layers of non-credit-bearing courses in their path, we were producing worse results for those students, rather than better results.” Remediation, they argued in a 2010 paper, wasn’t just ineffective; its structure made students less likely to graduate. They founded the California Acceleration Project with the goal of getting California community colleges to radically overhaul their approach to developmental education.

CAP stresses three major reforms: first, schools should institute co-requisite course designs, as in Tennessee; second, schools should condense remedial sequences into fewer semesters and better align them with college-level work; third, colleges should simply place fewer students into developmental classes in the first place. Many students who could succeed at college-level work—especially students of color—are nevertheless assigned to remediation based on standardized placement tests. To fix that problem, Hern and Snell say colleges should place students based on high school GPA, a more accurate predictor of college success. Unlike in Tennessee, California’s community college system is decentralized. That means CAP has been a grassroots, one-at-a-time effort. Hern estimates that about 75 percent of community colleges in the state have adopted at least some of CAP’s recommendations so far. She’s hoping to bring California colleges to the point where they will naturally approach remediation from the simple yet somehow radical premise of maximizing student success.

KAREN STOUT
Achieving the Dream

As the president of Montgomery County Community College for fourteen years, Stout developed a reputation for the kinds of unsexy institutional reforms that drive student success. She put together an executive team to map out all the points where student attrition happens, from application to graduation. Then she initiated a

host of changes to how faculty and staff interact with students, including an overhaul of the college’s student-advising system and a minority mentorship program. In 2014, the White House praised MCCC’s work to improve graduation and retention, and last year, Stout became president and CEO of Achieving the Dream, an initiative founded in 2004 to support community colleges around the country. Stout aims to build ATD into something analogous to the University Innovation Alliance (see Bridget Burns profile, below)—providing guidance, resources, and a forum for collaboration to drive large-scale innovation—but for a network of more than 200 colleges serving more than four million students. This fall, ATD will lead an effort at thirty-eight colleges, in thirteen states, to offer full degree programs using open education resources (OER)—free course materials instead of textbooks—which could save students thousands of dollars each. As important, in Stout’s view, is that moving away from textbooks will prompt faculty to get more involved in thinking about how to most effectively design their courses. And they won’t be going it alone. “In the past, any of the OER work on our campuses was typically done by one faculty member, one course at a time,” Stout says. “That approach won’t scale.”

NICOLE HURD
College Advising Corps

The national average ratio of guidance counselors to public high school students is 1 to 471; in California, it’s 1 to 1,000. Compounding the issue, counselors in modest and poor districts are evaluated based on whether their students finish high school, not whether they apply to and succeed in college. And, of course, wealthy

districts have more advisers than poor ones, which means that the kids who could use the most help are getting the least. Hurd founded the College Advising Corps to address the problem. A national service organization, the CAC recruits recent college graduates and deploys them to high schools with high numbers of low-income students. Think Teach for America, but for counseling—and with some important differences. CAC advisers overwhelmingly resemble the students they help: 66 percent are underrepresented minorities, 62 percent were eligible for Pell Grants in college, and 54 percent were the first in their families to go to college. They’re not taking anyone’s job: they’re on the payroll of the university they graduated from, with their salaries coming half from the university and half from a mix of philanthropic and public sources. The goal is to work with teachers, counselors, and principals to create a culture in which kids expect to go to college. Hurd recalls getting a call from a principal gushing about a CAC adviser. The adviser had found that many of her students refused to engage with the admissions process because they didn’t know anyone who’d ever gone to college. So she convinced the school’s teachers to put signs on their classroom doors showing not only their name, but also their alma mater—a small but meaningful way to make students realize that they were surrounded by people who had gone to college. The CAC can point to more concrete results, too. Over the past two years, college enrollment rates in its New York City partner schools have gone up by 35 percent. But Hurd knows the organization can’t single-handedly solve the college-advising crisis. “That’s not going to happen without public investment,” she says. “Part of our goal is to execute with excellence and keep proving to everybody that this works.”

BRIDGET BURNS
University Innovation Alliance

As an American Council on Education fellow at Arizona State University in 2013–14, Bridget Burns traveled to more than fifty campuses around the country asking two questions: How are you innovating to improve student success? And what are nearby schools doing? “No one ever answered that second question with any

level of specificity,” Burns says. She realized that a major barrier to innovation in higher education is the fact that universities just don’t share ideas. To fix that, she helped bring together eleven universities from around the country to found the University Innovation Alliance, in 2014, where she is now executive director. The member schools—all huge, public universities, including Georgia State and the University of Texas at Austin—have committed to collaborating on solutions to the obstacles facing low-income, first-generation, and minority students. Each school has a UIA fellow and a student success team. The UIA holds “convenings” on different campuses throughout the year, where members share ideas and—unlike at academic conferences—spend time coming up with a plan to bring those ideas back to their campuses. Burns points to predictive analytics, like the Georgia State program described above, as an example of a good idea that the UIA is helping go viral. This coming academic year, member schools will launch an unprecedented randomized controlled trial, using 10,000 students, to measure the effectiveness of analytics-based advising programs. In the past, Burns says, it may have taken years for an innovation like that to catch on. “What really matters is that, a year ago, I would have been talking about predictive analytics and telling you that we have three campuses actively using it. And now I can say we have nine.”

KAI DREKMEIER
InsideTrack

While much of the attention in higher education reform is focused on academic issues, the reality is that students’ life outside the classroom plays an even bigger role in whether they graduate. That’s where student-success coaching comes in. When Drekmeier cofounded the for-profit InsideTrack with Alan Tripp in 2001,

coaching was an unknown quantity. Now, after contracting with colleges to coach more than a million students, Drekmeier knows that the model works. Unlike tutors, who help with immediate academic challenges like an upcoming exam, InsideTrack’s student-success coaches focus on developing long-term life skills: handling family and work obligations, fitting into the campus community, staying motivated to graduate. A Stanford study in 2011 found that InsideTrack coaching led to improvements in college persistence and completion of about 5 percentage points; last year, a large-scale program with more than 2,000 low-income public university and community college students in Indiana yielded slightly greater improvements. Those numbers aren’t earth-shattering, but they’re significant—and, Drekmeier points out, the coaching pays for itself, since students who stay in school keep paying tuition. Over the years, InsideTrack has made its services cheaper by incorporating web-based coaching for the kinds of support that don’t require a sit-down meeting. Like the other leaders in this list, Drekmeier, president of InsideTrack, is interested in making a systemic impact. To that end, he has been shifting InsideTrack’s focus toward “capacity building”—training colleges and universities to do their own coaching. “It’s what the market is asking for,” he says. “But also it’s helping us accelerate progress on our mission, which is really to help improve graduation rates, career success, and unlock human potential—and we’re serious about that.” Indeed, Drekmeier speaks so consistently in terms of helping others that it’s easy to forget he’s running a for-profit company. He comes by his idealism honestly. “My parents are basically socialists,” he says. “I’m the first person in my family, in this generation or the last one, to have a for-profit-type job.”

The post The Sixteen Most Innovative People in Higher Education appeared first on Washington Monthly.

You can find the rest of the 2016 College Guide here and our full rankings here.

Twelve hours before Paul Quinn College’s biggest day of the summer, president Michael Sorrell is meeting with his staff. There’s a lot to discuss. A fund-raiser for the school’s on-campus farm is scheduled for tomorrow, and after that, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is playing a free outdoor concert on the lawn outside the chapel. These are two of the most high-profile events of the year for this 450-student historically black institution located off Interstate 45 in a working-class African American neighborhood of South Dallas. But Sorrell isn’t talking about any of that right now. He’s focused on how Vincent is doing at J. C. Penney.

Vincent Owoseni, a junior finance major from Brooklyn, is interning at the Texas-based department store chain as part of Paul Quinn’s work program, in which all students hold jobs on or off campus to help defray the cost of their education. But, Sorrell tells the room, Owoseni was having some trouble adjusting to the position—he was placed in the shipping department, which he wasn’t prepared for. Sorrell seems conflicted about the news. On the one hand, he tells his staff that Vincent needs to understand that unexpected assignments are part of any career and that he’ll learn just as much from the logistics side of J. C. Penney as from the customer-facing side. On the other hand, he treats the news as a possible warning sign. “He’s one of the best students we’ve got here,” Sorrell says. “If he’s having trouble, how is everyone else doing?” He assigns staffers to check in on other students who might be in similar situations.

When I later catch up with Owoseni, he expresses no surprise that his name came up in the meeting. Sorrell, he says, has been in touch throughout the internship. Indeed, he’d been reaching out to him since high school. Owoseni was valedictorian at City Polytechnic High School, and Sorrell flew out to meet him. “He was very inspiring,” Owoseni says. “He asked what I wanted to do. Then he told me, ‘You can do better than that.’”

“Better than that” is a fair description of Sorrell’s own aspirational leadership philosophy, and of the school’s trajectory since he took over as president in 2007. He arrived to find a college that was on the verge of closing its doors, buried under a mountain of debt with more than a dozen abandoned buildings and a four-year graduation rate of 1 percent. It seemed less “fixer-upper” than “lost cause.”

Sorrell went to work right away. He axed the expensive football program and turned the playing field into a farm, where students can work and from which food gets donated to the surrounding neighborhood. He traveled the country, visiting other colleges to learn from their presidents, and building up recruiting relationships with high schools. He nearly doubled the size of the student body, and raised millions from donors and corporate partners, enough to put (and keep) the school in the black.

The stunning turnaround of Paul Quinn has made Sorrell into a mini-celebrity. He’s been interviewed on HBO, spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and participated in countless higher education panels. But what he is increasingly getting attention for is the work program, which he first rolled out in 2015. All students are required to work at least eight hours a week, first on campus for the college, then off campus for participating employers. Twenty-four hundred dollars of students’ wages per year go to offsetting their tuition, the rest goes into their pockets. This has allowed Paul Quinn to slash its total cost of attendance from $23,800 to $14,275 a year. Sorrell’s goal is to get students into the job market with less than $10,000 in debt; the average student takes on only $2,300 in loans a year after Pell Grants and other subsidies along with work tuition credits.

The idea that students of modest means can contribute some of their labor in exchange for lower tuition is not new. Some Catholic high schools and a few rural liberal arts colleges have long operated that way. But Sorrell is the first to apply the model in an urban college setting. He is also the first to extend the concept beyond low-skill on-campus jobs to off-campus positions with private-sector employers, where students can garner skills and connections that might give them a leg up in the post-college job market.

This “New Urban College Model,” as Sorrell calls it, addresses some of the most pressing problems in higher education: how to substantially reduce tuition for lower-income, and especially minority, students in a way that colleges can afford; how to do so for students who need the high-touch support of a liberal arts college and who might otherwise get lost in a larger public university; and how to better integrate a liberal arts education with the job market. (Sorrell thinks his model can achieve even more—that reinventing the urban campus can also bring back depressed urban neighborhoods.)

It’s no wonder that Sorrell’s innovations are a hot topic in higher ed reform circles. The question is whether those interventions are, in wonk-speak, “replicable.” In other words, can other schools achieve what Paul Quinn College has without a one-in-a-million leader like Michael Sorrell?

Like a lot of colleges these days, Paul Quinn offers a “summer bridge” program, in which incoming students spend six weeks getting acclimated to college life in general and to Paul Quinn in particular by living in dorms and taking a few introductory classes. Unlike at other colleges, the president of Paul Quinn teaches one. “What’s on your mind?” asks Sorrell at the beginning of one such class this past summer. Only two weeks into their pre-college experience, the assembled students aren’t afraid to share. They end up discussing the then-recent nightclub shooting in Orlando, touching on religion, gun control, and gay rights over the course of twenty minutes, leading into Sorrell’s actual lesson plan about what makes a community. The conversation isn’t purely free-form; when a student is called on, she must first stand up and announce her name loudly to the class. Any drops in volume, grammatical errors, or uses of the dreaded filler word “like” will get called out by Sorrell. “He’s intense and kinda tortures students when he’s teaching them,” says junior Elexis Evans, one of his TAs, before quickly adding, “But he’s a great professor.”

Sorrell is six foot four, with an athlete’s physique, and he holds court with the confidence of someone who doesn’t mind reminding you that he was a star basketball player at Oberlin College. But even in his toughness he exudes empathy, recognizing which students he can needle and poke fun at and which ones need more positive reinforcement to get their confidence up. When the community lesson turns to crime and punishment—specifically marijuana legalization—he poses a question: “Hypothetically, how many of you have been in the vicinity of something illegal, like getting high?” About two dozen hands go up—which is about two dozen more than you’d expect from a bunch of soon-to-be college freshmen facing down the president of their Christian school. He laughs and gestures at those with their hands down. “Now, I know some of you are lying.”

Sorrell says he pushes students over the summer to prepare them for college, but offers enough support that they understand it’s constructive. “You can’t allow them to not be educated, but you have to create a safe space,” he says. “I spend a lot of time affirming my students. You’re safe, I love you, I’m here with you for the long haul.”

And that safe space can mean the occasional questioning of the professor. When he chides a student for starting her sentence with “I feel like,” classmates protest in her defense, arguing that it’s proper usage and not a filler. Sorrell argues that it’s not incorrect but rather “substandard,” in an attempt to quell the semantic mutiny as students break out their phones to check dictionary apps and weigh in. They’re eager to prove themselves; in many cases, it’s why they were recruited to Paul Quinn in the first place. About eight in ten students are getting Pell Grants, and more than 70 percent will get no money from their families to help pay for tuition. Two-thirds of them hail from outside Texas, with high numbers coming from cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Some have faced massive roadblocks in their path to college—extreme poverty, broken homes, multiple deaths in the family—and nearly all will have to work harder than they ever have before to succeed.

That includes little things like basic time management and academic skills, especially in preparation for the jobs to come. Many have never paid attention for an entire multi-hour lecture before, have never really written a paper, have nothing but anxiety at the prospect of tests that can make or break a grade. To foster a sense of professionalism, Sorrell enforces a business-casual dress code in classes. For those who don’t have the clothes, the school keeps a closet full of donated businesswear that students can borrow from. Those who struggle despite the staff’s hands-on approach can be put on the “Carrington plan”—they live together on the one dormitory’s third floor and maintain a schedule of distraction-free study hall sessions. The program is named after former undergraduate Ryan Carrington, a promising student whom Sorrell ordered to work at a desk in his own office after a massive drop in grades following a fraternity pledge. Sorrell took Carrington’s keys and cell phone and had him introduce himself to every visitor who came in. “He had never sat still long enough to learn,” Sorrell says. Sure enough, the grades went back up.

Sorrell (and the high school administrators who like to send him names) makes a point to find students like Carrington who can blossom with that extra push that Paul Quinn can provide, who have been dealt a difficult hand but have the potential to thrive in a college that’s meant to feel like a family. “There is this entrepreneurial spirit,” Evans says. “A lot of us didn’t realize we came here with that, but we had it brought out of us.” They may use “like” incorrectly at first, but they’re willing to fight for themselves when they get it right.

As Sorrell gets the class back on track following the great “like” debate, Trezuer Butler smirks at the scene. Butler came to the summer bridge program as an incoming freshman last year, taking her first-ever flight out of her native San Francisco. Now she’s a TA at the same bridge program, her work helping offset her tuition. Like many Paul Quinn students, the urban work college model wasn’t totally new to her—she came from a work high school, Immaculate Conception Academy, where the administrators have a relationship with Sorrell. She knew she wanted to go to a historically black school, and ended up getting in everywhere she wanted to go. She picked Paul Quinn after receiving a full scholarship, and Sorrell surprised her with a call after she accepted and convinced her to come to Dallas early for the summer program. Afterward, he stopped in San Francisco for Sunday dinner with her family, who were nervous about sending her off to Texas for good. “He got permission to watch me, punish me, motivate me,” Butler said. “I didn’t have a relationship with my dad, so he really stepped in and stepped up.”

What’s remarkable about these calls and visits is how unremarkable they seem as part of his larger recruitment strategy. It’s not uncommon for Sorrell and his staff to be on a first-name basis with students who are still in high school. The school estimates that only 10 percent of incoming freshmen aren’t recruited in some way by Paul Quinn. That closeness doesn’t end when they get to campus. “I firmly believe that you meet students where they are, and you love them, and you lift them,” Sorrell says. “I believe in authentic relationships.”

Sorrell says he needs to put extra work into building trust with students because his background isn’t the same as many of theirs. He grew up upper middle class in Chicago, where his father owned a barbecue restaurant and his mother ran a social work agency, and he attended St. Ignatius College Prep, one of the best schools in the city. He got an offer to play basketball at Oberlin, but took a recruiting visit and hated it. “It really was an uncomfortable place,” he says. “People protest everything, they question everything. I wasn’t a social outlier, so I became the outlier.”

As it turned out, the decision wasn’t really up to him. Sorrell’s mother decided that choosing a college was too important to leave to a teenager and forged his signature on the Oberlin commitment. He was livid. That’s illegal, he told her. He could sue! “You’re gonna sue your mother for sending you to one of the best schools in the country?” she replied. “We’ll see how that goes.”

The dispute never made it to court. Sorrell went off to Oberlin and, as expected, felt like a fish out of water, a Chicago jock among the hippies. But he found his place—thirty years later he’s on the cover of the latest alumni magazine and is still the basketball team’s fifth all-time leading scorer. One moment in particular from his undergrad days sticks out as a sign of things to come. A friend pulled him into a dinner with Johnnetta Cole, then president of Spelman College. He agreed because, hey, free food. But then he started talking to Cole. “She was the coolest president I’ve ever met,” he says. “I told myself, This is what college presidents can be like? Sign me up.”

That job wouldn’t come until much later, though. After Oberlin, Sorrell got his master’s degree in public policy from Duke. He liked it so much he stuck around for law school. But while he had always figured he would end up as a civil rights attorney, the notion seemed less and less appealing as time went on. “I began to realize the struggle was no longer in the courts,” he says. He got his JD, but set his sights on business school. Once again, Mom stepped in.

“She gave me the Peter Pan speech,” he says. It was time to leave academic Neverland to grow up and get a real job. (Little did she know.) So in 1994 Sorrell moved to Dallas to work for a law firm. He then spent two years in the Clinton White House working as a special assistant on the president’s race initiative. (He told the Dallas Morning News that he was “way down the food chain” in the White House, but he evidently made enough of an impression that, this past summer, he was able to lure the former president to speak at Paul Quinn.) After his sojourn in Washington, he returned to Dallas, where he spent the next decade practicing law and doing public affairs consulting, including working on Dallas’s 2012 Olympic bid. Understandably, he took a special interest in sports, representing NBA players and even helping former college players heading into the NBA draft to create political-style campaigns to up their stock. His connections paid off with an offer to join a group that wanted to buy the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies; he would have been franchise president and gotten a small ownership stake. He was driving to scout then University of Texas phenom (and future Oklahoma City defector) Kevin Durant when the people at Paul Quinn gave him a call. How would he like to be president of the college?

As he’s fond of saying, when you get offered a job you didn’t apply for, that’s probably a good sign no one else wants it. Paul Quinn was on the verge of bankruptcy, of de-accreditation, of closing down for good. Why hitch yourself to that wagon when you’re about to be an NBA executive? As it turns out, there are two reasons: Michael Sorrell likes a challenge, and he wasn’t about to be an NBA executive. He agreed to take over for ninety days while the board looked for a permanent president. When the Grizzlies deal didn’t work out, he became that permanent president.

Even outside of the financial and enrollment struggles, things were bleak those first few years. In addition to the massive deficits and threats of de-accreditation, the campus had fifteen abandoned buildings, and the ones that were occupied were in terrible shape. Anyone could wander onto campus, and often did (faculty members were afraid to leave their purses behind them in classrooms for fear that they’d be snatched). With 140 acres of Great Trinity Forest to the north and east, the unwelcome visitors weren’t always human. Sorrell remembers driving a local politician around campus about six months into his presidency when they saw what seemed like a big dog roaming the grounds. “That’s not a dog,” Sorrell says he realized as they got a closer look. “That’s a bobcat.”

(Sorrell reckons the bobcats were pushed out by coyotes, which have since been replaced by stray dogs. After a southern Dallas woman was killed by a pack of dogs in May, Sorrell’s summer bridge class’s big project this year was developing proposals for dealing with the neighborhood’s stray dog problem.)

Sorrell surrounded the campus with a fence and stationed security guards at the front to keep out strangers (and bobcats). Thanks to a million-dollar donation, he was able to get all fifteen abandoned buildings torn down, exorcising the campus’s most visible past demons. He began creating pipelines to bring in students who could meet his more rigorous standards. It was a pace of work that could give you a heart attack. A year and a half after he took over, that’s exactly what happened. Sorrell’s heart stopped overnight, and he was unconscious for nearly three days before coming to in the hospital. The experience only deepened his resolve. “I just remember thinking, we’re going to win,” he says. “I am a man of deep faith. And I don’t think the Lord saves you to humiliate you.”

Sorrell dove into studying what other college presidents were doing. “When I started as president, I didn’t know anything,” he says. “And I hate not knowing anything. So I immersed myself in my craft.” He read and reread Loren Pope’s Colleges That Change Lives and traveled the country visiting campuses, from nearby Prairie View A&M to far-flung Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. His biggest breakthrough didn’t come from a college visit, though, but a high school one. On a recruiting trip to Detroit Cristo Rey, Sorrell was wowed by the Catholic school’s corporate work-study program, in which students work once a week at local businesses. It was an idea ripe for expanding on the college level.

He spent the next year studying rural work schools like Berea College in Kentucky. A tuition-free institution founded by Christian abolitionists, Berea ranks number one on the Washington Monthly’s 2016 liberal arts colleges and Best Bang for the Buck lists. Admirable as it is, however, only seven rural colleges run on the work model, even though the idea has been around for a century. “The reason work colleges didn’t really take hold is partly because the work is drudgery,” Sorrell says. That’s because rural areas have few local employers where students can be placed in interesting, cutting-edge jobs. “In urban areas you can absolutely connect the work to what people are studying.” It was that insight that Sorrell brought to his board and students. Getting students real professional experience while lowering tuition costs was enticing enough on all sides to give it a try.

So far the new model has brought vast improvements in student outcomes, Sorrell says, though it will take a few more years for the statistics to catch up. While he increased the school’s official six-year graduation rate from 1 percent for students starting in 2006 to 13 percent for those who started in 2009, the latest figure comes right on the heels of Paul Quinn’s most turbulent period, in which hundreds of students left because of the shuttering of the football team, a disciplinary and academic crackdown, and lingering accreditation concerns. (The Washington Monthly’s current rankings only include an average of the graduation rates of the 2006, 2007, and 2008 cohorts.) The percentage of students who return after freshman year has since jumped from 33 percent at its low point to between 65 percent and 72 percent over the past few years, and Sorrell expects the graduation rates to follow. “The lagging indicators still measure the school that we were seven, eight, nine years ago,” he says. “We’re not that school anymore. When that graduation rate jumps, people are going to have whiplash.”

Sorrell expects that the work curriculum will only help retention. The We Over Me Farm, still Sorrell’s signature move as president, is the keystone of his model. While at first it may seem like another example of work college “drudgery,” students don’t only labor on the farm—they also work on the marketing and business sides, helping to solicit donations and make sales. While some of the produce is used in the dining halls, much of it is sold to Dallas restaurants and grocery stores along with larger corporate buyers like the Dallas Cowboys. And at least 10 percent of the produce every year is donated to charities in the school’s Highland Hills neighborhood, which sits in the middle of a food desert.

That’s where Sorrell’s plan to “end urban poverty” comes in. The work college model goes hand in hand with his idea of small urban colleges as “anchor institutions”; even a small school provides economic investment, employment opportunities, and cultural resources in inner-city neighborhoods. Thanks in large part to the success of the farm, for instance, a new grocery store is opening up across the street. Paul Quinn students organized to successfully fight off a city plan to significantly expand a nearby landfill farther into Highland Hills. Students marched multiple times, wearing “I AM NOT TRASH” T-shirts, and eventually Dallas relented and threw away the landfill plan. Now Sorrell is lobbying city officials for a light-rail stop in the neighborhood, which would serve his students (who often have to take difficult bus routes or drive to their jobs around the region) as well as Highland Hills commuters. And while Paul Quinn may be gated, it can still provide an artistic as well as economic impact: in addition to lectures and symposiums that are open to the public, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra plays a free show on campus every year, which Sorrell calls his favorite event the school puts on.

Sorrell got his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania last year using the New Urban College Model as his dissertation. In it, he argues that his model can be copied across the country. There are 1,725 four-year colleges in U.S. principal cities, and about 70 percent have fewer than 5,000 students. “This model was built to be replicated,” he says. “I’m worried about what happens if it doesn’t catch on.”

The question is, can the model catch on without such a charismatic figure leading the charge? Sorrell has an astounding ability to command the room no matter who’s in it. He can banter with students, run a staff meeting, talk with education policy wonks, chat up church leaders, and network with big donors locally and around the country. Education reform is full of examples of brave new ideas that flourished under their innovator but faltered when tried elsewhere.

Sorrell counters that there are many different types of college presidents, and that his model can work with different kinds of leaders—though there’s one quality they need. “It’s replicable, but you need a champion,” he says. “You don’t necessarily need Michael Sorrell, but you need a champion.”

Paul Quinn College, of course, is lucky enough to have both.

On the day of the farm fund-raiser and the symphony concert, Sorrell is in the library trying to figure out exactly what he wants his message to be. Paul Quinn staff and students are writing words of inspiration on their bodies and getting photographed, the results of which will be posted around campus and used in the school’s new marketing campaign. Butler, Evans, and other students are writing, erasing, and rewriting slogans and hashtags on Sorrell’s arms in a flurry of markers and baby wipes. He has always been the face of Paul Quinn, but today he’s going to have to be the biceps, too.

As he poses for the photo, the students heckle from the sidelines. “We don’t want to be scared of our president!” Evans yells as Sorrell tries on a tough look. Later, at the concert, they’ll unsuccessfully lobby him to buy them dessert from one of the food trucks parked nearby. “We want some ice cream! Come on, do your fatherly duties!”

Ice cream aside, Sorrell’s fatherly duties—checking in on students before they even arrive on campus, meeting their families, looking after them on campus—may be his greatest gift to Paul Quinn. But his New Urban College Model could be his gift to the rest of the country. A system that keeps tuition low while allowing students to get real professional experience in preparation for entering the job market would be a godsend for small city schools that often struggle to do either of those. Paul Quinn College, no longer the underdog, is showing the rest of them how it’s done. Bringing the model to cities across the country and ending urban poverty might be farther down the line, but for now Sorrell still has to take it one student at a time.

After the concert, as students, staff, and community members are lining up to say goodbye to Sorrell, a boy pulls him aside. Robert, a high school sophomore who came all the way up from Houston, wants to tell him how much he likes Paul Quinn. They exchange email addresses, and Sorrell makes him promise to send him a note when he gets home. “You have it in you to do really, really well,” Sorrell tells him. “Your grades will matter. Drown out all the background noise. The lights come on, the teacher’s in front of you. Give it all you’ve got.”

The post Labor of Love appeared first on Washington Monthly.

You can find the rest of the 2016 College Guide here and our full rankings here.

Over the last decade, the internet has made it much easier for students to apply to college, especially thanks to services like the “Common App.” For the nearly 700 schools now part of the Common Application—the nation’s leading standardized online college application portal—students can browse by name, state, or region, by the type of institution (public or private), and by whether it’s co-ed or single-sex. Clicking on a college takes students to a brief profile of the school and then an invitation: “Ready to apply?”

And now that students can apply to more colleges with the click of a few buttons, they are doing exactly that. In 2013, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC), 32 percent of college freshmen applied to seven or more colleges—up 10 percentage points from 2008. Almost all of this growth has been online. In the 2015–16 admissions cycle, over 920,000 students used the Common App, more than double the number in 2008–09.

On the one hand, the internet has been good news for college access. Officials at the Common App, for example, say 31 percent of the college applicants who used the portal in 2015–16 were first-generation students. Students and their families are also now smarter consumers of what’s likely to be among the biggest ticket items they will ever buy: a college education. The internet has also been great news for college marketing departments, which can now reach many more students—and more cheaply—than they could via old-fashioned snail mail.

But the growing piles of applications are also causing problems—both for colleges and for students. While schools might welcome the rush of national exposure from a broader pool of prospects, they also increasingly face the problem of sorting out qualified, serious applicants—students who not only have the right academic chops but would actually enroll if accepted—from the scrum. And so long as the sheer volume of applications continues to rise, the odds of colleges’ guessing wrong rise too—which, in fact, is what’s happening, with dire consequences.

For students, the flip side is how to rise above the growing tide of competition, or how to hedge their bets if they don’t. For middle-class and upper-income students, this means more hassle, anxiety, and expense. But for

lower-income students, it means barriers that could prove insurmountable. While the college admissions process has long been a game that favors those who know the rules, a crowded market is just one more way of stacking the deck against those who don’t or can’t afford to play.

For many schools, the national applicant pool made available by the internet has been a great way to raise their “selectivity”—a metric that matters greatly for traditional college rankings, like those of U.S. News & World Report. The lower the percentage of students admitted, the more “selective” the college. This means a school that admits the same number of students every year can appear more “selective” if its applicant pool is bigger and more students are rejected.

Many schools discovered that online applications, including the Common App, were an easy way to help grow the pool of prospects. The Common App, for example, offers a standardized application, “auto-fills” students’ personal data from form to form, and offers tools to help manage submissions. Adding new schools to a student’s wish list can be accomplished with a click. At some schools, simply replying to an email is enough to make a student an applicant. “As colleges moved to online applications, many of them looked to streamline the process so it wouldn’t be as cumbersome for students,” says David Hawkins, executive director for educational content and policy at NACAC. “A lot of colleges also found that it resulted in a lot more applications coming in.”

At the University of Colorado Boulder, for example, freshman applications jumped by roughly 28 percent in 2013, the year the university joined the Common App, and have continued to grow, according to the admissions director, Kevin MacLennan. While the school saw 22,437 applications in 2013, it fielded 34,100 applications this year. Most of that growth has also come from out-of-state and international students, from whom applications have risen by more than 10,000 since 2013. “The quality of our applicants has gone up,” MacLennan says. “[It has] increased in grade point average and high school rank, but in test scores as well.”

For smaller schools, a digital admissions marketplace has helped to shortcut their path into the national or international spotlight. “Who knew about Macalester [in St. Paul] in the early 1990s—or Rollins [outside Orlando]?” says educational consultant Jeff Knox, who works with the Bethesda, Maryland–based firm PrepMatters. “But they’re becoming really popular.”

The concern for colleges is that selectivity and national reach aren’t the only metrics that matter. Just as critical is “yield”—the share of accepted students who actually enroll. It’s what colleges use to project their revenues and manage their finances, and miscalculations can be fatal. Too few students—too low a yield—can spell shortfalls that lead to budget cuts, fewer classes, or even faculty layoffs. In 2013, for example, St. Mary’s College of Maryland president Joseph Urgo resigned after the school fell short of its enrollment targets by nearly 25 percent. On the other hand, too many enrollments could mean not enough student housing or financial aid. At Temple University earlier this year, an unexpected number of acceptances for the incoming freshman class—a higher-than-expected yield—caused the school to exceed its financial aid budget by $22 million and resulted in the abrupt ouster of both provost Hai-Lung Dai and president Neil Theobald.

Most schools, however, are having trouble finding the right students. In fact, despite the online application boom, schools are in crisis around yield. NACAC’s 2014 State of College Admission survey found that the average four-year college yield rate was 35.9 percent—down from 48.7 percent in 2002. At the University of Colorado Boulder, for example, admissions director MacLennan says that while about half of the in-state students who are accepted are likely to enroll, the school yields one out-of-state student for every five or six offers—a yield rate of roughly 20 percent. At Drexel, one of the schools that pioneered the reply-to-this-email-and-you’re-an-applicant trick, the school’s yield rate plummeted to as low as 8 percent despite a surge of applications. The college has since taken steps to stem the flood by returning to a more traditional process.

The cause of all this volatility is a problem in the college admissions marketplace that Stanford University economics professor and Nobel laureate Alvin Roth calls “congestion.” “Congestion is what happens when you have a lot of people in the market and too many offers,” says Roth, author of Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. “It’s gotten easier to apply to colleges, but now colleges get many more applicants. That changes the ‘signal to noise’ ratio.” It’s an ironic and unintended consequence of college admissions on the internet: the seeming efficiency of online applications means less efficiency overall.

But if colleges are aiding and abetting this market congestion, a big share of the burden of coping with it has fallen on prospective students, the wealthiest of whom are best equipped to navigate the marketplace.

For example, many schools are increasingly relying on “early decision” and other tools to secure commitments from top recruits. According to NACAC, nearly half of colleges said they admitted more students through early decision during the 2013–14 admissions cycle, while the number of early decision applicants also grew. While colleges enjoy the certainty of a student’s commitment to their school (and the resulting boost in yield), the downside for students is less ability to compare financial aid packages across schools. As a result, affluent students are the most likely to apply early decision, especially to more-selective schools. A 2016 investigation by the Washington Post found that many top schools filled as many as half of their freshmen classes with early decision students, effectively shutting out lower-income students from a big part of the applicant pool.

The same bias afflicts schools’ increasing reliance on “demonstrated interest”—another tactic colleges use to raise their yield by looking for proactive indications that a student will enroll if accepted. “It used to be that applying was how you demonstrate interest, but it’s just not the case these days,” says educational consultant Jeff Knox. In fact, some admissions officials say that “demonstrated interest” is now almost as important as an essay or teacher recommendations in determining who gets admitted.

The best way for a student to demonstrate interest is to visit the campus. The problem is that while a college tour might be a rite of passage for middle-class and affluent students, it’s far less feasible for students without the resources or support to visit prospective schools.

In addition to campus visits, colleges are also creating elaborate systems to track and measure students’ interest in other ways. “Colleges now have these sophisticated electronic dashboards so that every interaction with them is logged into the system,” says NACAC’s Hawkins. “Even something as simple as liking a college on Facebook—that’s a little checkmark in your dashboard. It’s part of a very comprehensive recruitment strategy that colleges are now engaged in because of this uncertainty around yield.”

“We also know every interaction students have had with the university,” says the University of Colorado Boulder’s MacLennan. “Maybe they’ve come in and visited the campus for an information session. Maybe they’ve toured the campus. Maybe they’ve shown up on a high school visit or brought their parents to one of our hotel programs. We have a record of not only how many times we have contacted them but how many times they’ve contacted us, and that will begin to show the strength of their interest.” These records can begin as early as ninth grade.

Of course, most students have no idea that this is how colleges are judging them. Some, however, do, because they have the means to hire private educational consultants who can explain the rules of the current admissions marketplace. “One way to tell that the market is dysfunctional is if you have to hire a guide,” says Stanford’s Roth. “The college admissions process at one point was supposed to be something that high school seniors could do for
themselves.”

According to Mark Sklarow, CEO of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA), the number of private educational consultants has skyrocketed over the past decade. Sklarow estimates that there are 5,000 full-time consultants nationwide, including the roughly 1,500 who are members of his organization, plus another 10,000 to 15,000 consultants working part-time. Thirty years ago, Sklarow says, educational consultants numbered less than 100 and catered exclusively to the highest-income families. Today, he says, the typical client is a middle-class or upper-middle-class student in a public school. Despite the mainstreaming of private counseling, it’s still expensive. Sklarow says that the typical cost of hiring a consultant to help with college admission is about $4,500, spread out over three years, beginning in a student’s sophomore year. While some consultants charge a flat fee, others charge an hourly rate, which averages $160 nationally.

In addition to the perceived complexities of applying to college, the shortage of public school counselors is what’s driving demand for private admissions consultants. “There’s an increased need for counseling and a decrease of availability,” says Sklarow. The average ratio of students to school counselors in public schools is now 491 to 1, according to the American School Counselor Association, up from 460 to 1 in 2012. According to a study by the nonprofit CLASP, high-poverty public high schools are twice as likely as other schools to have no counselor at all. Instructively, many private admissions consultants have gotten into the business because their jobs as high school guidance counselors were eliminated.

The confusion caused by the congestion in the college admissions market, together with a shortage of guidance counselors and the emerging dance around “demonstrated interest,” could exacerbate the problem of “under-matching,” where high-quality lower-income candidates are channeled into less-selective schools, where their chances of graduating are lower and their lifetime earnings lower even if they do graduate. But there are growing risks for other students, as well, because there’s no obvious endpoint for the escalation in applications. As long as students continue to apply to more and more schools, the noise in the market and its attendant uncertainties will increase. This, in turn, prompts yet more applications by students anxious to hedge their bets by casting a wider and wider net. It’s a deepening, bottomless spiral.

Unless the colleges choose to stop it.

One way to do this, says Washington, D.C.–based educational consultant Shelley Levine, is for colleges to stop marketing to students just to pump up their application numbers and “selectivity.” For one thing, this system is unfair to students. “You wouldn’t believe the students who come into our office saying they’ve received letters from Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Washington University saying they’re just the kind of candidate the school is looking for,” she says. “I say stop giving false hope.”

But the only way for this to happen is for colleges to abandon their obeisance to “selectivity” and other metrics that distort students’ choices toward “prestige” and away from the more important consideration of fit. Given the losing battle that colleges seem to be engaged in over the question of yield, this is one place where what’s best for students might be the right answer for colleges, too.

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You can find the rest of the 2016 College Guide here and our full rankings here.

In his unexpectedly strong campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders won the loyalty of millions of young voters with a promise of “free college for all.” Hillary Clinton campaigned on a more modest proposal to achieve “debt-free” college. But earlier this summer, to win Sanders’s support after all but clinching the nomination, Clinton announced her own, similar plan for free in-state tuition at public colleges for families making up to $125,000 a year.

There is no denying the appeal of “free college,” especially to Millennial voters facing sky-high tuition and crushing college debt burdens. As Sanders and other advocates for the idea note, when the country recognized a century ago that all Americans ought to have the opportunity to earn a high school degree in order to succeed in an industrializing economy, it created a system of free public high schools. Today, we are at a similar point regarding college: some post–high school credential—a bachelor’s degree, or a two-year associate’s degree, or even a one-year vocational certificate-is virtually a must-have for anyone aspiring to a middle-class life.

But sometimes, the simplest and most historically resonant idea isn’t actually the best idea. Hillary’s free college plan is, at least, a plan; so far, Donald Trump’s higher education proposals haven’t gone much beyond putting banks back in charge of student loans and defending fraud at Trump University. Unfortunately, the Clinton free college plan, like the Sanders plan it was built on, simply won’t work in a federal system of government where states have made widely different investments in higher learning. And—counterintuitively for a multibillion-dollar nationwide reform plan—it isn’t radical enough. What we need instead is to rebuild the state-federal higher education partnership from the ground up. Rather than making college free for some students, we need to make it affordable for all.

The first problem with Clinton’s new plan is that states spend widely different amounts of money subsidizing college tuition. Higher education funding has also declined in many states, even as college spending has increased, causing schools to hike tuition to fill the gap. Clinton’s plan would start by giving each state enough money to bring tuition down to zero for some. But that means the plan would actually reward states that have cut funding the most, and that have historically spent less on their higher education systems, by giving them larger amounts of money to fill the hole.

In Wyoming, where higher education funding is a bigger priority, the state spends an average of $15,135 per student to subsidize tuition, enabling it to charge only $4,891 in tuition and fees. New Hampshire, on the other hand, spends far less of its own money—$2,904 per student—and puts more of the burden on students to pay for their education. That’s why in-state tuition in New Hampshire costs $15,160. Under Clinton’s plan, New Hampshire would receive a lot more money per student to make tuition free, because students pay more tuition.

It’s easy to anticipate the fallout—members of Congress from states like Wyoming will immediately cry foul. Over time, the Clinton plan would aim to even out funding per student among states, but then states like New Hampshire would be up in arms about having their grants reduced unless they raise taxes to make up the difference. Some might opt out entirely, much as some states have refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

Moreover, the plan only promises “free tuition.” Much of the cost of college for low-income students doesn’t come from tuition but from paying for food, housing, and books. While Clinton’s plan would allow Pell Grants to be applied to these cost-of-living expenses, the grants would only fill part of the gap, leaving low-income students to fill the rest with long working hours, or debt.

Indeed, many community colleges already offer free or very low tuition, even as elite public research universities have been aggressively increasing tuition. The University of Michigan, for example, charges in-state students $14,402 in tuition and fees. At Macomb Community College in Detroit, in-state students taking a full sixteen-credit course load pay only $6,040. The Clinton plan would provide more than double the benefit to students who already have the academic advantages of enrolling in the more well-funded flagship university.

There is also a huge loophole in the Clinton plan’s insistence that free college will apply only to “public” schools. There are no federal standards for what it means to be “public.” That status is defined by states and states alone. Some, like Pennsylvania, have created a class of “state-related” universities, which include Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple, that have wide latitude in how they operate. Were the Clinton plan to go into effect, state legislatures would be under immense pressure to grant “state-related” status to private colleges suddenly struggling to compete with “free.” They would undoubtedly assent, greatly increasing the cost of the Clinton plan.

The Clinton plan also fails to take on a key aspect of the federal financial aid system that makes the system so dysfunctional: that it is delivered as “vouchers” to individual students, in the form of Pell Grants, tax credits, and federally subsidized loans. Billions of dollars in largely unregulated vouchers have been snatched up by shady colleges that market to unsuspecting students, while financing an epic expansion of national student loan debt.

These vouchers also reward schools that charge more for tuition. A school that charges more than the maximum Pell Grant award ($5,815 for the 2016–17 academic year) can keep the entire grant for itself, while a school that charges less would have to make the remaining amount available to the student to cover books, housing, and other expenses. The same is true for student loans—the bigger the tuition, the bigger the loan, and the bigger the benefit to the school. The Clinton plan leaves vouchers and loans in place.

Vouchers also allow colleges to shift scholarships they might have given to needy students to wealthier students, who can do more for the college’s prestige and bottom line. A recent report found that 94 percent of private colleges and almost 50 percent of public colleges now charge low-income students more than $10,000 a year. In 2010–11, only a third of public colleges charged low-income students that much. Colleges can do this because they know the federal government will ride to the rescue, providing extra aid to low-income students.

Voucher money comes with few strings attached, one reason that nearly half of students who start college fail to graduate on time, and that student loan defaults have reached record highs. And while Clinton’s campaign language includes vague promises to hold colleges accountable for “improving completion rates and learning outcomes,” it offers no details about how this will be done.

Sticking a poorly designed free college guarantee on top of the existing dysfunctional voucher system is a bad idea. Instead, we should replace the entire existing system with something that will actually work.

A better way would be to take the money currently being spent on federal vouchers, loan subsidies, and tax credits, and use it to create a new, formula-driven federal grant program for states to subsidize higher education. Under this plan (recently proposed by New America, where I work), states would receive money based on the number and income level of low-income college students enrolled in their states. State agencies would then be responsible for giving that money to eligible colleges—but only if colleges agreed to charge students no more than their official Expected Family Contribution, or EFC. Millions of students receive this estimate every year when they fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The EFC is a kind of official judgment of shared responsibility, a statement of how much families can afford to contribute toward the education their children need.

The plan would make college affordable for every student at public, private, and for-profit colleges that opt in, which would mean a large net increase in federal funds to higher education. After replacing Pell Grants, loans, and tax credits with the new block grant, it would cost an additional $38.6 billion a year (because more students would receive aid)—in the neighborhood of the Clinton plan.

To be eligible for these funds, states would have to maintain their current funding and match 25 percent of the new federal money, which would add an additional $17.9 billion a year to higher education. States would also be expected to hold colleges accountable for student outcomes related to learning, graduation, and employment, and they would be responsible for deciding which colleges could participate in the program. This would weed out the bad actors who currently profit from the voucher system.

The plan would lower college costs for most students. Currently, almost 90 percent of families earning less than $30,000 per year are charged more for college than their EFC, compared with only 37 percent of families making more than $110,000. Colleges would also be required to enroll at least 25 percent low-income students, a bar 89 percent of colleges currently meet. Those that don’t are mostly elite, wealthy schools that least need government support.

States could, as with Clinton’s plan, choose to opt out by not taking the new federal money. But they’d be less likely to do so because, unlike the Clinton plan, this plan eliminates Pell Grants and federal student loans. States that opt out would leave their students and colleges without vital funding. The plan would empower states to customize their higher education systems. It would give governors more control over the millions of federal dollars that flow to higher education. And, unlike the Clinton plan, it wouldn’t discriminate against private not-for-profit and for-profit colleges. These elements should appeal to conservatives worried about leaving room in the market for innovation and maintaining the federal-state balance of power.

The plan also simplifies the federal investment in higher education. Instead of a multitude of federal programs to help pay for college—a system the Clinton plan would make even more complex—it would create a single program flowing through states. The plan would communicate a simple message that should please progressives: no student will be expected to pay more for college than he or she can afford. At the same time, it will bring more accountability to the federal investment in higher education, ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly.

The plan is also progressive because it focuses the greatest resources on low-income students. In fact, nearly 80 percent of the funding would go to families earning under $48,000.

The current financial aid system is complex and broken. Students are sold on a future they can’t afford. The country deserves a complete rethinking to make colleges more affordable and accountable. What it doesn’t deserve is for Washington to spend the next few years fruitlessly fighting over pragmatically challenged “free college” proposals. Hillary Clinton was right to resist, for most of the campaign, the urge to jump on Sanders’s free college bandwagon. Let’s hope she can find a way to jump off, and get on board a plan that can actually deliver results for
students.

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There are two primary goals to our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. Thus, all three main categories were weighted equally when calculating the final score. In order to ensure that each measurement contributed equally to a college’s score within any given category, we standardized each data element so that each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The data was also adjusted to account for statistical outliers. No college’s performance in any single area was allowed to exceed five standard deviations from the mean of the data set. All measures use an average of the three most recent years of data in an effort to get a better picture of a college’s performance rather than statistical noise. Thanks to rounding, some colleges have the same overall score. We have ranked them according to their pre-rounding results.

To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,863 colleges in the fifty states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and have a 2015 Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges, are not exclusively graduate colleges, participate in federal financial aid programs, and plan to be open in fall 2016. As the Carnegie classifications were updated this year for the first time in five years, some colleges switched categories or moved into or out of our sample. This represents the first major update to our ranking categories since 2011. We then excluded 356 baccalaureate and baccalaureate/associate’s-level colleges which reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2012 were below the bachelor’s-degree level, as well as eighteen colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in any year they were open between fall 2012 and fall 2014, and an additional seventy-eight colleges with fewer than fifty students in the federal graduation rate cohort (first-time, full-time students) between 2012 and 2014.

Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants or student loans) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). This resulted in a final sample of 1,406 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges. As a final precaution to weed out especially questionable colleges, we cross-checked every ranking with the Department of Education’s second-level Heightened Cash Monitoring List. Then we randomly selected five schools on each of the lists, checked their status on the less drastic first-level Heightened Cash Monitoring List for signs of instability, verified their accreditation, and searched through local and national news clips over the past year for signs of problems.

The social mobility portion of the rankings changed significantly this year in response to newly available data on student outcomes from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, with four of the eight factors contributing to the social mobility score coming from the Scorecard data. A college’s graduation rate (from the IPEDS) counted for 20 percent of the social mobility score, with half of that being determined by the reported graduation rate and the other half coming from comparing the reported graduation rate to a predicted graduation rate based on the percentage of Pell recipients and first-generation students, the percentage of students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and whether a college is primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model separately for each classification using average data from the last three years, imputing for missing data when necessary. Colleges with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” college with similar stats score better than colleges that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. A few colleges had predicted graduation rates over 100 percent, which we then trimmed back to 100 percent.

We used IPEDS data for the percentage of a college’s students receiving Pell Grants and College Scorecard data on the percentage of first-generation students in order to get at colleges’ commitments to educating a diverse group of students. (Graduation rates for these groups of students aren’t available yet in federal data, but Pell graduation rates should be coming in a year or two.) We then estimated predicted percentages of Pell recipients and first-generation students based on regressions using admit rates and ACT/SAT scores. The gaps between actual and predicted percentages counted for 20 percent of a college’s score, with 13.33 percent for Pell performance and 6.67 percent for first-generation performance. We measured a college’s affordability by using data from IPEDS on the average net prices paid by first-time, full-time, in-state students with family incomes below $75,000 per year over the last three years. We focused on these income categories due to our interest in affordability for students from lower- to middle-income families. Net price counted for 20 percent of the social mobility score.

We have wanted to include more data on students’ economic outcomes for years, and now the College Scorecard provides us with that opportunity. The first metric we used compares the median earnings of a college’s former students (graduates and dropouts alike) ten 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 metric is worth 20 percent of the social mobility score.

The other new metric is a 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 had previously used data on the percentage of students defaulting on their loans within three years of entering repayment, but the repayment rate is a far better measure of students’ economic circumstances. We use the raw repayment rate for 10 percent of the social mobility score and a regression-adjusted repayment rate (using the same predictors as the graduation rate metric) for another 10 percent.*

The research score for national universities is based on five measurements: the total amount of an institution’s research spending (from the Center for Measuring University Performance and the National Science Foundation); 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 full-time 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 components equally to determine a college’s final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master’s universities, and baccalaureate colleges, which do not have extensive doctoral programs, science and engineering PhDs were excluded and we gave double weight to the number of alumni who go on to get PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academy 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 in four equally weighted 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. The final two measures are based on data reported to the Corporation for National and Community Service by colleges and universities in their applications for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. One measure is the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects. The second measure is more complicated and includes the percent of students doing community service, the number of hours of community service per student, whether any staff were employed in community service, if any service courses were offered, or if the institution provides scholarships for community service. Colleges that did not submit applications in a given year had no data and were given zeros on these measures. (Our advice to those colleges: If you care about service, believe you do a good job of promoting it, and want the world to know, then fill out the application!)

*In January 2017, the U.S. Department of Education announced a coding error that affected loan repayment rates from the College Scorecard—a component of our rankings. Most colleges’ repayment rates dropped by about ten percentage points, but this did not materially affect individual colleges’ ranks. For accurate loan repayment data for a particular college, please visit the College Scorecard website.

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