Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 88)

a notE on MEthoDoloGy: 4-yEar CollEGEs anD UnivErsitiEs here are two primary goals to our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. Thus, all three main categories were weighted equally when calculating the final score. In order to ensure that each measurement contributed equally to a school’s score within any given category, we standardized each data set so that each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The data were also adjusted to account for statistical outliers. No school’s performance in any single area was allowed to exceed five standard deviations from the mean of the data set. Thanks to rounding, some schools have the same overall score. We have ranked them according to their pre-rounding results. The set of colleges included in the rankings has changed since last year. For the 2011 rankings, we included all colleges ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 2010. U.S. News changed its selection criteria in 2011 and we wanted a clear set of rules for including or excluding colleges, so we developed specific criteria for the Washington Monthly rankings. We started with 1,762 colleges that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as having a Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges and were not exclusively graduate schools. We then excluded 145 colleges which reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2009–10 were not bachelor’s degrees as well as the seventeen colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in fall 2010. Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in ROTC, whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and 88 September/October 2012 T thus no Pell Grants) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). Our final set of exclusions was to not rank colleges that had not reported any of the three main measures used in the social mobility section (percent Pell, graduation rate, and net price) in the past three years. This resulted in a final sample of 1,569 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges. Each of our three categories includes several components. We have determined the community service score by measuring each school’s performance in five different areas: the size of each school’s Air Force, Army, and Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, relative to the size of the school; the number of alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps, relative to the size of the school; the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects; a combined score based on the number of students participating in community service and total service hours performed, both relative to school size; and a combined score based on the number of full-time staff supporting community service, relative to the total number of staff, the number of academic courses that incorporate service, relative to school size, and whether the institution provides scholarships for community service. The latter two measures are based on data reported to the Corporation for National and Community Service by colleges and universities in their applications for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. The first is a measure of student participation in community service and the second is a measure of institutional support for service. Colleges that did not submit applications had no data and were given zeros on these measures. Some schools that dropped in our service rankings this year completed an application in 2010 and therefore received credit in last year’s rankings, but did not submit an application in 2011 and therefore did not receive credit on these measures in this year’s rankings. (Our advice to those schools: If you care about service, believe you do a good job of promoting it, and want the world to know, then fill out the application!) The research score for national universities is also based on five measurements: the total amount of an institution’s research spending (from the Center for Measuring University Performance and the National Science Foundation); the number of science and engineering PhDs award-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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