college rankings – Page 2

Friday Five: ROI on the rise

The interactive College Scorecard gives students and families five key pieces of data about a college: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, average amount borrowed, and employment. (Source: www.ed.gov/blog/) — The interactive College Scorecard gives students and families five key pieces of data about a college: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, average amount borrowed, and employment. (Source: http://www.ed.gov/blog/)

President Obama’s announcement of a new College Scorecard during his 2013 State of the Union Address on Tuesday marks the latest and arguably most prominent pronouncement that return on investment, or ROI, is now viewed as the most important factor in determining the value of a college education in the United States.

We higher ed types can argue until we’re blue in the face that the true value of a college education is not a matter of mere dollars and cents. We can argue that value isn’t just about how much you pay for your degree and what kind of job you’ll get once you graduate. But judging from the president’s State of the Union comments, the economic benefits of a college degree loom large as an important factor in the discussion.

Obama introduced the College Scorecard as a tool “parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria — where you can get the most bang for your educational buck” (emphasis added). Education Secretary Arne Duncan echoed the president’s sentiments, writing on his blog that the scorecard “empowers families to make smart investments in higher education.”

The problem with the scorecard as it’s currently configured, however, is that it doesn’t provide much information about the earning potential for graduates of any of the schools listed in the database. (That’s one of many bugs to be worked out, apparently.)

Obama introduced the College Scorecard as a tool ‘parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria — where you can get the most bang for your educational buck’

Fortunately, there are other resources where prospective students and their families can turn to get some of that information. None of them are perfect, but they do offer consumers some way of looking at the economic outcomes of a college degree. So until all the bugs are all worked out of the College Scorecard and ROI information is included, these will have to do.

PayScale’s ROI Report. Several years ago, PayScale saw the day coming when ROI would become a bigger consideration for prospective students. The organization developed an annual report, based on surveys of graduates and tuition data, to create a scorecard of their own. The interactive tool allows visitors to review more than 850 colleges and universities and sort the data in a variety of ways, such as 30-year net ROI, annual ROI, type of institution (private or public), category (liberal arts, engineering, research, etc.) and so on. Click on an individual school and you can see graduates’ median salary by occupation. Many third-party media outlets, including some listed below, relay on PayScale for salary data used in their own value ranking formulas.
U.S. News & World Report‘s “Best Value” Colleges. The granddaddy of the college rankings game, the publication college administrators love to hate (except when the U.S. News rankings make their institutions look good), does actually offer some value for people looking for, well, value. The relatively new “Best Value” rankings consider “academic quality” as judged by U.S. News‘ annual rankings, but also weigh that against other factors, such as “net cost of attendance for a student who receives the average level of need-based financial aid.” It isn’t perfect, but it also isn’t based solely on dollars and sense, because U.S. News attempts to calculate that evasive beast “academic quality” into their formula.
Newsweek‘s “Most Affordable Colleges” ranking. Just weeks before announcing it would become an all-digital publication, Newsweek put out a college rankings guide of its own last summer. In addition to several Princeton Review-esque listings of top party colleges, most liberal and conservative campuses, happiest and most stressful schools, etc., the publication looked at what it called “long-term affordability.” Which means: “In other words, the schools that landed atop of our most affordable list may not have the lowest sticker price, but when measured through a lens of the potential earnings with a degree from each institution as well as the average debt level of graduates, these are the schools where students are most able to shoulder the cost of their degree — and where the education has a proven record of being a valuable investment relative to other schools.”
ABC News’ “Better Than Harvard” rankings. Last fall, ABC News mashed up PayScale’s earnings data with tuition and fees data from the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking to come up with a news story of sorts: “12 Colleges Whose Payoff In Pay Beats Harvard’s.”
ROI by college major. A rash of online sites have latched on to the ROI craze by discussing majors with the greatest return on investment. Maybe students and their parents care more about which majors will lead to great jobs more than what college to attend. U.S. News ran one such article last fall, coinciding with the release of its latest annual “Best Colleges” book. And the Huffington Post network of websites periodically runs similar stories, like this one from last spring and this one (republished from Forbes) from just a few weeks ago. Then there are the flip side stories, like this one about college degrees that offer the worst ROI.

None of these tools are types or articles are perfect, but they do attempt to show the one aspect of value that the president’s College Scorecard so far has not provided: the employment outlook for college graduates.

No matter what you think about the ROI craze, you might as well accept the fact that it will be around for a while. We might as well accept it and, like Obama, figure out a way to make the best of it.

Friday Five: We don’t need no stinking U.S. News badges

Continuing on the U.S. News & World Report college rankings theme:

stinking-badges You may have heard some of the uproar among higher ed types caused by U.S. News‘ decision to sell universities the right to post the magazine’s rankings “seal of approval” badge on institutions’ websites.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education points out, U.S. News has been selling campuses the right to use the badge in print materials for years — so charging a fee for this seal of approval is nothing new. The magazine is just extending its product line into the virtual sphere. But at a pretty hefty price tag: $8,200 for unlimited use. “That’s chutzpah,” Flacklife‘s Bob LeDrew said in his comment on a somewhat-related post on this blog.

Here’s what some other higher ed folks have to say about the badge flap — and an appeal to hear something from the other side:

Mike Richwalsky, on his blog HighEdWebTech, was talking about this issue even before the rankings were made public. “We’ll be referencing the rankings starting tomorrow once the embargo is lifted,” Mike wrote. “One thing we won’t have is the logo. I don’t know if having that along with our news release is worth $700-800 and way up from there for print rights. Will some schools pony up for the logo? I think so. But I would guess many won’t – seeing how bad budgets are right now.”
In that post, Mike shared a tweet from Karine Joly, which gave me a chuckle: “How about an alternate badge that would say: I’m ranked as a top tier college but prefer to spend 1K on scholarship instead of badge fee?” Not a bad idea.
Another idea, from a poster on CASE’s Communications-L listserv, which was abuzz with discussions about the badge: “I’ll be happy to pay to use their badge, as long as they pay for the cost of advertising their magazine on our website and in our alumni magazine, and they’re welcome to pay for the portion of any ad we run which features their badge ad.”
Another listserve member summarized the feelings of many: “We consider it disturbing that the rankings are being linked to attempts to make exorbitant fees on licensing, and it further negates the hotly-contested validity of such rankings in the public’s eye when they are linked to profiting from the schools who are ranked – which seems to be a pretty short-sighted move on the part of these publications. Both Forbes and U.S.News already benefit greatly from the visibility of the rankings, and from each time their badge is promoted in conjunction with them by a college. In a time of economic crisis for education as a whole, schools cannot and should not allocate resources in such a manner and I find the attempt to sell us this to be offensive.”
Enough with the complaints. What’s the upside of this controversy for institutions? Any of you readers purchasing the badge to display on your websites? Let us know why, and the benefits you hope to gain from it.

Have a great weekend.

College rankings do matter (just not to us)

The annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings are out, and as usual, the occasion is the cause of a lot of cognitive dissonance for many of us in the higher ed marketing and PR business.

number-1 On the one hand, we claim to loathe the rankings for all the reasons you’ve heard before: flawed methodology, inherent bias in favor of elite institutions, it’s a popularity or beauty contest, there is no emphasis on outcomes, etc.

On the other hand, we are quick to promote the good news any such third-party validation provides for our institutions. And with U.S. News‘ constant tweaking of the rankings — this year’s includes lists by academic specialties and region as well as rankings by high school guidance counselors, “Great Schools at Great Prices,” “A-plus Schools for B Students,” “Up-and-coming colleges” and so on — there’s seemingly a ranking for any institution conceivable. It’s almost to the point where one colleague’s tweet about the rankings — We’re a top 50 women’s junior engineering seminary! — is not so far-fetched and may be coming soon to a college viewbook near you.

Yes, there are a few of you out there who take the high road and don’t publicize or comment on rankings. For instance, Hamilton College’s president, Joan Hinde Stewart, is among a group of 20 presidents who have pledged “not to mention U.S. News or similar rankings in any of our new publications, since such lists mislead the public into thinking that the complexities of American higher education can be reduced to one number.” But many of us do promote the rankings in one form or another, even if we hold our noses while doing so. Hence, cognitive dissonance.

Like many of my higher ed marketing comrades, I don’t care much for the annual U.S. News rankings. The reason? Brace yourself for some hypocrisy: It’s because we don’t look so hot.

Mind you, we’re not in the gutter. But we look a lot better in other rankings. Like PayScale’s salary rankings. We look very good in those rankings, because the average starting salaries of our graduates are pretty high. That’s an outcome, my friends, measurable and grounded in facts. Not some flimsy reputational ranking based on the views of a bunch of deans and presidents.

But I digress. The point is that while we may not think much of these rankings, some of our audiences like them. When their alma maters place high in the rankings, alumni take pride in knowing they went to a quality school. When their campuses place lower, they rally to the defense of their old school, joining in on the attack against the ranker’s flawed methodology, or they lament the decline of quality at their alma mater since the good old days.

Usually, though, if the rankings news is pretty good, audiences will take pride in it. This is a point the folks at BlueFuego make in a blog post a couple of days ago. While we PR types may not issue a press release about our rankings for news media consumption, we would be smart to inform students, alumni and other parties of the results through our own media or via social media. As BlueFuego points out, doing so may yield surprisingly positive results.

BlueFuego looked at how universities that scored high in another recent ranking (Forbes) publicized the news via Facebook pages. Using their formula to measure engagement (a combination of comments and “likes”), BlueFuego concluded that the status updates yielded better-than-average engagement on those Facebook sites.

That’s also been the case with our campus Facebook page. Even though our latest U.S. News rankings weren’t exactly stellar, and weren’t what seasoned PR flacks would consider even remotely newsworthy, our Facebook audience responded favorably to the information with 17 likes, which is pretty good for our page.

In April 2009, I posted an entry about the importance of these rankings to various audiences, especially international students. “The rankings game will continue,” I wrote, “and U.S. News and other media sources that rank institutions do so because they bring a sort of third-party validation to the process that higher ed just cannot seem to provide itself.” Third-party validation is a marketing ploy as old as PR itself, whether it comes in the form of testimonials, survey results (remember “four out of five dentists recommend…”?) or college rankings.

P.S. – While we’re on the topic of rankings, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Missouri S&T is ranked No. 1 among the nation’s top 30 Awesome College Labs, as determined by Popular Science magazine (September 2010). Third-party validation, baby! Gotta love it.

Photo: Neilson makes his own foam hand, by Carolyn Coles/Flickr

College rankings: they live!

I missed the original post last month on The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Brainstorm blog, but U.S. News blogger/rankings maven Bob Morse brought the subject up on his blog, Morse Code, just last week. And so I’ll bring it up here.

*'Night of the Living Dead' via FilmDungeon.com*

It’s a topic near and dear to the hearts of so many of us in higher ed PR and marketing circles. It’s a topic we love to hate, or hate to love.

I’m talking, of course, about college rankings.

Why College Rankings ‘Will Never Die’ is the title of Morse’s April 9 post. In it, he points to the Brainstorm commentary by Kevin Carey, policy director for the D.C. think tank Education Sector, who relates a conversation he had with “an education official from a large but sparsely populated North African country.” Carey says that conversation illustrated for him “why college rankings are an unavoidable reality of higher education in the 21st century and as such need to be embraced, not rejected.”

Morse quotes the crux of Carey’s argument for embracing rankings like U.S. News‘. As Carey writes:

The choices are so many and the institutions themselves are so complex that there is simply no practical way for time and resource-limited individuals (or foreign ministries of education) to gather complete information about every possible choice. [What Carey seems to miss is that “resource-limited” individuals may not be able to afford the online subscription fee U.S. News charges to access in-depth rankings. – me.] It can’t be done. So they’ll rely on some other, larger, self-proclaimed expert institution with greater resources to do it for them. And that gives the self-proclaimed expert, the evaluator, the ranker, enormous leverage in defining the terms of quality in higher education and as such the incentives under which decisions are made.

Things are only going to keep moving in this direction—more mobility, more information, more choices, more institutions or higher-education providers, more people all over the world having to make choices about postsecondary education and seeking guidance and interpretation to do so. Colleges can cede that responsibility and thus, control over their destiny, to for-profit newsmagazines. Or they can come together and seize that power back by defining and standing behind rankings of their own. And yes, it has to be a ranking, or some kind of process where institutions are compared to one another in a transparent, common way, a process that facilitates choice given time and resource constraints.

I’m afraid Carey is correct. The rankings game will continue, and U.S. News and other media sources that rank institutions do so because they bring a sort of third-party validation to the process that higher ed just cannot seem to provide itself.

There is value to third-party organizations to provide information for consumers of education. But until U.S. News and their counterparts start emphasizing outcomes in their approach rather than the bogus reputational scores of college and university presidents and deans, their methodology will be suspect. And by outcomes, I mean measurable, quantifiable outcomes, such as average starting salaries of graduates by major, placement rate (not only occupational, but also in graduation or professional schools), and the like.

Unfortunately, educational institutions don’t seem to be able to agree upon the right metrics for their own ranking system. And so third-party rankings, like zombies, continue to rise up and feast on the brains of their readership.