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The Wall Street Journal came out with its college rankings last week and UW- Madison came in at #67. There are a number of reactions you might have to that.
The first one is probably something like, “Sixty-seventh? What the hell?! We’re better than that! Didn’t Sports Illustrated rank us #1?” The answer is yes, they did rank us first in the nation but that was for football game day atmosphere. Nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills.
A more nuanced reaction might be, “Sixty-seventh. All right. Not bad.” This would be based on the knowledge that the Journal ranked almost 1,000 schools. That would put the UW in the top seven percent.
But the reaction of the more sophisticated of you might be, “Who cares?” You can’t really rank an education in any sort of meaningful way. Abraham Lincoln didn’t go to any university at all and yet he is maybe the most powerful intellect ever to hold office in our country though I suppose you could get an argument from Thomas Jefferson. On the other hand, Donald Trump got a top-flight education. Can we rest our case right there?
But I think the Journal rankings (and similar rankings from other publications like U.S News) mean something whether we want them to or not. It would be nice if we could view higher education as an ennobling adventure, one intended to create a more well-rounded, thoughtful citizen, more capable of living a fulfilling life and contributing to his community. But the fact is that for most of us, college is in large part a transactional thing, an investment in our future.
One thing that has driven that view is the rising cost of an education. When national statistics show that the average student is coming out of school with a debt just under $30,000 they and their parents want to know what they’re going to get for it. So, the Journal rankings can be thought of as another piece of consumer information.
They have even helpfully provided a ranking of the best bargains. Tiny Berea College in Kentucky comes out as the best value, but surprisingly, Princeton is ranked as the 10th best overall value. According to the Journal, the average annual all-in cost at Princeton for students who get financial aid is only $16,302, while the UW comes in at $15,910. Yep. It can wind up costing only $400 a year more to go to Princeton, ranked fifth best overall, than it would to go to the UW, ranked 67th.
Princeton winds up tied with Harvard for #1 in “outcomes,” meaning the kind of job and income students are likely to get after they graduate and therefore probably the most important of the Journal’s 15 ranked factors to investment-conscious students and parents. The UW does pretty well in outcomes, ranked 40th in that category.
The UW’s best ranking is in “engagement,” which is defined by the Journal as how connected students feel to their campus environment as measured by student surveys. The UW is ranked 16th on that measure while Princeton comes in in the 401-600 range (when a school gets that far down the list the Journal doesn’t bother to even give it an exact number ranking). So, here’s where the Sports Illustrated game day fun honors come into play. “Sweet Caroline,” “Jump Around” and “the cheer” don’t count for nothing, folks.
But here’s the most serious point of all, in my view. The UW ranks a dismal 275th in “resources,” which refers to endowments, private fundraising and state and other government support. And, in fact, no public institution ranks higher than 25th on the overall list of best schools, largely because few public schools come anywhere near the private schools in their available resources. The Journal notes that overall state financing for their public universities is still way down from what it was before the Great Recession.
There is a tremendous amount of attention paid these days to the student debt “crisis.” I think that is overblown. In fact, the Journal lists the average debt for students coming out of the UW after four years as only about $22,000. For all the increased earning potential that comes with a college degree that doesn’t strike me as unreasonable.
Rather than focus on debt and strategies like a tuition freeze, it seems to me there should be more attention paid to the actual quality of the education and the overall results in measurable things (like income) and even in intangibles (like life satisfaction and contributions to one’s community) that come from a college education.
In short, we need to pay more attention to, for lack of a better word, value. A free college education that results in no job and no income is worth exactly what you paid for it. On the other hand, a student who graduates with $100,000 in debt but is likely to get a starting salary of $100,000 with annual pay increases probably got a bargain in the long run.
Simply put, public schools would do better if they had more resources. That would make the value of a UW education worth more at the same or even at a higher price. It turns out, as I noted above, that the net cost of an education at Princeton isn’t all that much more than the cost of the UW. But Princeton does better for value because it has a much better overall ranking due in some part to its far greater resources.
You may disagree with me about the relative importance of student debt (most people seem to), but we can probably agree that at least returning to a pre-recession public investment in our public universities would be in everyone’s best interest.
