F. King Alexander, President of Cal State Long Beach, asserts in today’s “Inside Higher Ed” that people need to change how they evaluate a college’s program. Currently colleges are ranked by “US News” in large part by SAT scores and graduation rates (first-time, full time enrollees who earn degrees within six years). Princeton leads the country with a rate of 97 percent. Cal State Long Beach reports a 48 percent graduation rate. Alexander insists a comparison of these two numbers does not accurately reflect the relative quality of education offered at the two institutions.

Alexander does not propose throwing out graduation rates as a tool for comparison, but suggests adding to that measure the total graduates (8000 for Long Beach, much less for Princeton) and the percentage of students who are eligible for Pell Grants (a proxy for serving disadvantaged students). Alexander suggest that by adding these numbers many of the excellent public universities would begin to compare favorably with the private institutions that currently dominate the top of the US News rankings and thereby have more of an opportunity to catch the attention of the highly qualified high school seniors.
It would be an oversimplification if you discard Alexander’s proposal as an attempt to bash elite private schools and build up public universities. In the same article, he notes that Cornell University, University of Southern California and Brigham Young University are currently ranked slightly less competitive than their peers but graduate far more students from economic bases that include larger shares of Pell eligible students than their peers. Alexander is asking that we consider which institution is really doing the best by its students? For parents and students, its not as simple to know which school is “better” as US News would like us to think.