Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - 89

ed by the university; the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject, relative to the size of the school; the number of faculty receiving prestigious awards, relative to the number of full-time faculty; and the number of faculty in the National Academies, relative to the number of full-time faculty. For national universities, we weighted each of these components equally to determine a school’s final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master’s universities, and baccalaureate colleges, which do not have extensive doctoral programs, science and engineering PhDs were excluded and we gave double weight to the number of alumni who go on to get PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academy membership were not included in the research score for these institutions because such data is available for only a relative handful of these schools. As some readers have pointed out in previous years, our research score rewards large schools for their size. This is intentional. It is the huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and PhDs that larger universities produce, combined with their enormous amounts of research spending, that will help keep America competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the two measures of university research quality—faculty awards and National Academy members, relative to the number of full-time faculty (from the Center for Measuring University Performance)—are independent of a school’s size. The social mobility score is more complicated. We have data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey that tell us the percentage of a school’s students on Pell Grants, which is a good measure of a school’s commitment to educating lower-income students. We’d like to know how many of these Pell Grant recipients graduate, but schools aren’t required to report those figures. Still, because lower-income students at any school are less likely to graduate than wealthier ones, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is a meaningful indicator in and of itself. If a campus has a large percentage of Pell Grant students—that is to say, if its student body is disproportionately poor—it will tend to diminish the school’s overall graduation rate. We first predicted the percentage of students on Pell Grants based on the average SAT score and the percentage of students admitted. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with SAT scores and admit rates) are making the effort to enroll

low-income students. (Since most schools only provide the twenty-fifth percentile and the seventy-fifth percentile of scores, we took the mean of the two. For schools where a majority of students took the ACT, we converted ACT scores into SAT equivalents.) The predicted graduation rate measure has been substantially changed since last year’s rankings, based on research by Robert Kelchen, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and methodologist for this year’s college guide, and Douglas N. Harris, associate professor at Tulane University. While last year’s formula predicted graduation rates based on the percentage of Pell Grant students and its average SAT score, this year’s formula includes other characteristics that are associated with the academic preparation and resources of its students. In addition to the percentage of Pell recipients and the average SAT score, the formula includes the percentage of students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and institutional characteristics such as type of control (public, private nonprofit, and for-profit), and whether a college is a historically black college or university (HBCU) or primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model separately for each classification, either using data from a prior year or imputing for missing data when necessary. Schools with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” school with similar stats score better than schools that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. One school, the California Institute of Technology, had a predicted graduation rate of over 100 percent. We adjusted this graduation rate to 100 percent. We then divided the difference between the actual and predicted graduation rate by the net price of attendance, defined as the average price that first-time, full-time students who receive financial aid pay for college after subtracting need-based financial aid. This cost-adjusted graduation rate measure rewards colleges that do a good job of both graduating students and keeping costs low. Two colleges (Berea College and Macon State College) reported negative net prices and were scaled back to the smallest positive net price reported by any college ($1,255). The two social mobility formulas (actual vs. predicted percent Pell and cost-adjusted graduation rate performance) were weighted equally. —Eds.
Washington Monthly 89

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2012