Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 120

A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY:
4-YEAR COLLEGES
AND UNIVERSITIES
T
o establish the set of colleges included in the rankings,
we started with the 1,594 colleges in the 50
states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education's
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System
(IPEDS) and have a 2021 Carnegie basic classification of
doctoral, master's, and baccalaureate colleges, are not exclusively
graduate colleges, participate in federal financial
aid programs, and had not announced an impending closure
as of June 10, 2022. We then excluded 28 colleges with
fewer than 100 undergraduate students in any year they
were open between fall 2018 and fall 2020 and an additional
five colleges with fewer than 25 students in the federal
graduation rate cohort in 2019 and 2020.
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 the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), whereas
the service academies provide all students with free tuition
(and thus no Pell Grants or student loans) and commission
graduates as officers in the armed services (and
thus not the ROTC program). Finally, we dropped an additional
49 colleges for not having data on at least one of
our key social mobility outcomes (percent Pell, graduation
rate, net price, or the number of Pell recipients earning
bachelor's degrees). This resulted in a final sample of 1,507
colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and forprofit
colleges.
Our rankings consist of three equally weighted portions:
social mobility, research, and community and national
service. This means that top-ranked colleges needed
to be excellent across the full breadth of our measures,
rather than excelling in just one. In order to ensure that
each measurement contributed equally to a college's score
within any given category, we standardized each data element
so each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation
of one (unless noted). Missing social mobility data (affecting
less than 1 percent of all observations) were imputed
and noted with " N/A " in the rankings tables. We adjusted
data to account for statistical outliers by allowing no college's
performance in any single area to exceed five standard
deviations from the mean of the data set. All measures
(unless noted) use an average of the three most re120
September/October 2022
cent years of data in an effort to get a better picture of a
college's performance rather than statistical noise.
The social mobility portion of the rankings also doubles
as our Best Bang for the Buck rankings, with the exception
that the main rankings are by Carnegie classification
while the Best Bang for the Buck rankings are by region
(while predicted rates are calculated by Carnegie classification).
We used a college's graduation rate over eight years
for all students instead of the first-time, full-time graduation
rate that is typically used but presents an incomplete
picture of a college's success. This graduation rate counted
for 16.66 percent of the social mobility score. Half of that
score was determined by the reported graduation rate and
the other half came from comparing the reported graduation
rate to a predicted graduation rate based on the percentage
of Pell recipients, 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 whether a college is primarily
residential. We estimated this predicted graduation
rate measure in a regression model separately for each
classification using average data from the last three years,
imputing for missing data when necessary. Colleges with
graduation rates that are higher than the " average " college
with similar stats score better than colleges that match or,
worse, undershoot the mark. A few colleges had predicted
graduation rates over 100 percent, which we then trimmed
back to 100 percent.
We used IPEDS data comparing graduation rates of
Pell and non-Pell students to develop a Pell graduation
gap measure. Colleges that had higher Pell than non-Pell
graduation rates received a positive score on this measure,
which was based on just the one year of available data and
counted for 16.66 percent of a college's score. We included
the number of Pell recipients earning bachelor's degrees,
which is designed to reward colleges that successfully
serve large numbers of students from lower-income
families. This measure, from IPEDS, counts for 8.33 percent
of the social mobility score.
We also used IPEDS data for the percentage of a college's
students receiving Pell Grants to get at colleges'
commitments to educating a diverse group of students.
Our measure compared actual shares of Pell students to
the predicted share after controlling for ACT/SAT scores
and the share of families in a state with incomes below
$35,000 and between $35,001 and $75,000 per year. The Pell
enrollment performance measure counted for 8.33 percent
of the social mobility score.
We measured a college's affordability using data from
IPEDS for the average net prices paid by first-time, fulltime,
in-state students with family incomes below $75,000
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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