Page 157 - Crisis in Higher Education

128 • Crisis in Higher Education

graduates from open-enrollment, public universities who scored 19
on the ACT. The information, which is difficult to attain, is whether
applicants with 19 on the ACT would gain more knowledge at an elite
school than they would at a public university.
2. Salaries as outcome measures: Some prefer to use the salaries of grad-
uates to measure the quality of education, but this approach does not
resolve the fundamental advantage that elite schools have because
they accept top students. Besides, surrogates like salary are impacted
by other factors, including cost of living and the quality of university
alumni networks, which is discussed in the next numbered point.
There are parts of the United States along the East and West Coasts
where the cost of living is very high such as financial districts and
technology corridors. A $75,000 salary goes much farther in Fort
Wayne, Indiana, than in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Serious efforts
to measure the educational quality should assess what was learned,
which means pretesting as students begin their university education
and posttesting at graduation.
3. Better networking and status: This may be the real advantage
of a degree from an elite school. A degree from the University of
Pennsylvania opens doors at financial institutions and on Wall
Street, and it provides a network that is willing to consider fellow
alumni for employment. A degree from Stanford University may do
that for graduates who seek jobs in Silicon Valley. Measuring the
long-term impact of this advantage on job satisfaction and income is
challenging.

6.1.3 University Rankings

For more than 30 years, US News and World Report has ranked universi-
ties in the United States. There are now dozens of rankings that consider a
wide variety of criteria, have very different schemes to weight the criteria,
and use subjective judgments to compile their lists from best to worst.
In all of these rankings, the elite universities tend to be at the top, fol-
lowed by a jumble of institutions without much rhyme or reason. Some of
these systems use objective criteria like the average ACT scores of incom-
ing students or the percent of applicants admitted, so a university with
an average ACT of 33 that admits only 6% of its applicants has a natural
advantage. A university that is open enrollment may have an average ACT