Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 106

income families. Net price counted for 16.66 percent of the social
mobility score.
The first metric of financial success we used compares the
median earnings of a college's former students (graduates and
dropouts alike) ten years after initial enrollment to predicted earnings based on the variables used to predict graduation
rates as well as two other factors designed to take colleges' missions and locations into account. We adjusted for a college's mix
of bachelor's degrees awarded, using STEM, education, business, health, social science, and liberal arts as broad degree categories. We also adjusted for regional living costs using fair market rent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to account for
the fact that $40,000 per year in the rural South goes much
farther than $40,000 per year in the Washington metropolitan area. This metric is worth 16.66 percent of the social mobility score. The other financial success metric is the student loan
repayment rate, reflecting the percentage of students who paid
down at least $1 in principal within five years of leaving college and entering repayment. We use the raw repayment rate
for 8.33 percent of the social mobility score and a regressionadjusted repayment rate (using the same predictors as the graduation rate metric) for another 8.33 percent.
The research score for national universities is 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 awarded 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 college; 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
college's final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master's universities, and bachelor's 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 colleges.
We determined the community service score by measuring each college's performance in five different measures. We
judged military service by collecting data on the size of each
college's Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC programs and dividing by the number of students. We similarly measured national
service by dividing the number of alumni currently serving in
the Peace Corps by total enrollment. We used the percentage of
federal work-study grant money spent on community service
projects as a measure of how much colleges prioritize community service; this is based on data provided by the Corporation
for National and Community Service. Each of these three measures was standardized using a three-year rolling average, except for work study (which used the two most recent years of
data available).
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September/October 2019

We then added an indicator for whether a college provided
at least some matching funds for undergraduate students who
had received a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award for having
completed national service. Colleges that awarded at least some
grants to students regardless of programs received two points,
colleges that limited grants to specific undergraduate programs
received one point, and colleges that did not participate or limited awards to only graduate students received no points.
Finally, we used a measure of voting engagement using
data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) at Tufts University and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Colleges could earn up to five points for fulfilling each of five criteria. They could receive up to two points for
participating in the NSLVE survey in 2016 or 2018 (one point for
each year). They could receive one point for publicly releasing
their 2016 NSLVE report on student voting rates, provided that it
is accessible on ALL IN's online database. They could receive up to
two points for creating an action plan through the ALL IN Campus
Democracy Challenge in 2016 or 2018 (one point for each year).
We compared our rankings to the U.S. Department of Education's list of colleges subject to the most severe level of heightened cash monitoring, which indicates that a college is facing significant financial problems or has other serious issues that need
to be addressed. Four colleges (Bacone College in Oklahoma,
Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Wiley College in Texas) were on that list as of
March 2019. We kept these colleges in our rankings, but denoted
them with ^ to draw this concern to readers' attention. Finally, we
checked a random sample of colleges to see if they had any serious issues that had been exposed in recent news coverage. No institution had concerns that rose to the level of us removing them
from our rankings. -Eds.

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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