Our nation’s top universities have secured their rankings for — well, forever. Each year when The U.S. News and World Report releases its “highly anticipated” college rankings, there is very little actual anticipation. Harvard, Princeton and Yale will always hold the most prestigious spots, and there will always be negligible variation in the Top 10 colleges. Schools with the lowest acceptance rates and highest cost of tuition receive better rankings, while schools with steady graduation rates and feasible financial aid policies are assigned unfavorable numbers. Factors that determine the rankings actually say very little about the quality of education respective colleges provide. According to The U.S. News and World website, the top factors of determining ranks are the undergraduate academic reputation, faculty resources and student selectivity. These three categories alone constitute 55 percent of a college’s rank.
Basing a college’s respectability on such flaky criteria has created a caste system in higher education — colleges ranked in the uppermost tier will stay there, leaving very little room for other universities to progress to top spots.
Colleges with more limited endowments cannot afford to rise in rankings based on faculty resources and academic reputation, both of which can be improved through increased endowment funds. According to Harvard University, one of the largest categories of endowment funds is faculty salary; universities with an arsenal of savings have more leverage in recruiting the most renowned intellectuals to teach at their universities. This would increase the “Faculty Resources” consideration. Schools with very low acceptance rates draw more applications because of it —students acknowledge their slim chances of acceptance and consequently apply to more. Even if a student wants to attend Stanford, they will likely apply to other elite universities to increase the likelihood of attending one. Because, in the end, an elite college is the goal. Whether this college is in Cambridge or New York or Palo Alto is irrelevant.
In an attempt to reduce the stratification present in our education system, President Barack Obama proposed an innovative system for ranking colleges. The idea was proposed in 2013 and pushed for two years before it was abandoned this year. Obama’s proposal made sense — it was based on tuition costs, graduation rates, job salary of alumni, proportion of lower-income students and average debts after graduating. It provided prospective students and their parents with a correlation between the success of alumni and the cost of education, which is an important consideration for the average American family. It also provided the government with a more accurate idea of how to designate government funds.
While presenting his idea at the State University of New York Buffalo in 2013, Obama said, “There are also schools out there that have higher default rates than graduation rates. And taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing students to go to schools where the kids aren’t graduating.” Using Obama’s system, colleges that use taxpayer dollars to actually produce graduates would be rewarded with maximum government funding. This would provide incentive to all higher-level institutions to promote mentor and outreach programs, implement more effective career services, admit students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and make active efforts to lower tuition costs.
The standard for education is increasingly more demanding. Individuals who stop their higher education at a bachelor’s degree are becoming steadily underqualified for jobs that were once within reach. Employers in nearly every sector are demanding master’s degrees, Ph.Ds. or specialized training and the chance a student has at receiving a graduate-level education is somewhat dependent on their undergraduate school. Students that went to the revered Top 20 universities will be more impressive to graduate schools than students from affordable public colleges and therefore will have increased chances of being accepted. This is how those colleges stay in the top caste.
The updated system proposed by Obama was a truly needed change in our education system. Colleges are being rewarded for rejecting masses of students and charging outrageous tuition rates when they should be rewarded for providing quality education to a diverse population of students. Obama’s system was abandoned after years of fury from upper-caste university presidents and conservatives in Congress, but entities like NPR calculated their own lists based on President Obama’s criteria. Harvard, MIT and Stanford were still highly ranked on their list of schools promoting upward mobility, but a plethora of public schools suddenly appeared in the Top 15. It is nearly impossible to imagine a day when California State University – Stanislaus would be ranked higher than Yale, but under the Obama administration this could have been possible. Maybe in another two years.