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Religious penalty in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings
Abstract
Since its debut in 1983, the U.S. News & World Report College Guide has become the premier 'consumer report' of higher education. We find that peer assessment, which is the largest component of the U.S. News & World Report ranking function, contains a penalty for religiously affiliated schools that is independent of the other U.S. News & World Report variables and several proxies for quality. Possible explanations of the religious penalty include taste-based discrimination, perceived differences in the quality of the curriculum, and strategic voting by college administrators.
Using a survey of college of business deans, the authors investigate perceptions of published rankings of academic programs. Published rankings have become quite prominent, and anecdotal evidence suggests great efforts are being undertaken to be included in rankings or enhance rankings. The authors conducted a survey of business school deans to gain a better understanding of their perceptions of published rankings, and found that the majority of deans included in the survey did not perceive rankings to be reflective of underlying program quality. However, the majority chose to pursue rankings because of the perceived benefits to the university, students, and alumni. The authors also found statistically significant differences in deans' perceptions across universities with different accreditation statuses, sizes, and funding sources.
In 1997 a medium-size Midwestern public university in the U.S. initiated a first year experience program. The program is designed
to infuse added curricular and extracurricular components into core courses in an effort to integrate students into the university
community. This article examined the FYE impact on grade point average (GPA) and retention after 1year for the fall 2006
cohort of entering students. The findings suggest no positive FYE effect on retention, but on average FYE students earned
higher GPAs than non-FYE students. Reducing the sample to include only courses identified as goal compatible FYE courses yielded
a positive effect on retention and also accentuated the GPA differential. The estimated positive FYE impact on retention was
larger for below average students (especially females) and smaller for above average students.
[Excerpt] U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) shook up the college guide industry when it began publishing its annual rankings of colleges in 1983. The summary of its annual rankings of colleges as undergraduate institutions that appear in a fall issue each year is by far the best selling issue of USNWR each year and, together with its more comprehensive annual America’s Best Colleges publication, it has become the “gold standard” of the college ranking business. USNWR’s rapid rise to the top derives from its rankings’ appearance of scientific objectivity (institutions are rated along various dimensions with explicit weights being assigned to each dimension), along with the fact that USNWR then ranks the top 50 institutions in each category (for example national universities and liberal arts colleges). Each year immediately before and after the USNWR college rankings issue hits the newsstand, stories about the USNWR rankings appear in virtually every major newspaper in the United States. I begin my remarks by discussing why Americans have become so preoccupied with the USNWR rankings and why higher education institutions have become equally obsessed with them. Next I discuss how the rankings methodology allows colleges and universities to take actions to manipulate their rankings and the effects that such actions have on higher education. I then ask if the rankings are flawed, why do colleges and universities continue to participate in them and I discuss some of the major problems with the ratings. Finally, I offer some brief concluding thoughts about how USNWR could alter its rating formula in ways that I believe would be socially desirable.
This study estimates translog variable cost functions for 147 American doctorate granting universities, accounting for three major products of these institutions: undergraduate and graduate instruction, and research. Explicit measures of research output and quality are employed. Evidence is found for considerable economies of scale for the average institution, as well as economies of scope related to the joint production of undergraduate and graduate instruction. The public or private ownership of an institution is not significant for the explanation of variable costs. The intensity of state regulation in the public sector does not have a significant impact on production efficiency. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.
This study empirically estimates a multiple-product fixed total cost function and output relationship for liberal arts colleges in the United States. Statistical results based on data for 295 private liberal arts colleges suggest that there are both economies of scale and economies of scope in higher education. Furthermore, product-specific economies of scope do exist for all output levels and activities. Research activity at liberal arts colleges is not cost effective.
Asserts that this annual ranking of the nation's academic institutions exacerbates their competitiveness and influences them to alter their behavior in ways that misserve individual students and higher education as a whole. Suggests how the rankings could instead encourage helpful institutional collaborations. (EV)
This paper describes in both economic and mathematical terms the learning production process at the individual level and derives from that profile a model to determine which factors affect that process. The model is successfully tested using data from two widely divergent learning situations, ranging from lecture-oriented college level principles of economics courses to the use of programmed instruction to learn matrix arithmetic at the eighth grade level.
The present paper departs from the hypothesis that successful teachers are characterized by being able to manipulate student effort. Grading is identified as a potential teachers’ tool, and its quantitative importance is investigated by estimation of an education production function. The main econometric problems are omitted variables biases due to correlations between different elements in the teacher behavior vector, and teacher behavior that is endogenous to student achievement. A large number of variables describing teacher behavior, a difference-in-differences approach, and finally, an instrumental variable approach are offered as solutions. Notably, the grading practices turn out to be correlated with the number of schools in the municipality; thus identifying the number of schools as a credible instrumental variable. Hard grading leads to improved achievement, but hard grading is less likely to occur in competitive environments.
Using data from 541 classes in South Carolina, OLS and frontier production functions are estimated. Results indicate that classes taught by teachers who received merit awards show greater mathematics and reading achievement gain scores, as are classes in which there are fewer students who receive free or reduced-fee lunch. Results for teacher sex and race are ambiguous, as are results for teacher education. We also found a positive relation between achievement and class size, contrary to popular perceptions. Finally, the results from the frontier production function strongly suggest that at least some degree of inefficiency is present in the South Carolina education system. Some suggestions for school improvement are offered.
This paper uses student-level Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data to analyze the determinants of schooling quality for seven Eastern European transition countries by estimating educational production functions. The results show substantial effects of student background on educational performance and a much lower impact of resources and the institutional setting. Two different groups of countries emerge. For the first group that features high mean test scores and has progressed far in transition, large effects of family background on student performance and a higher spread of test scores illustrate the similarity to Western European schooling systems, the performance of which it surpasses. Schools of the second group produce instead a denser distribution of educational achievement, characteristic of communist societies.
This paper uses the growth model involving an aggregate production function to measure the social benefits from human capital improvements due to the investments in higher education. This is in contrast to previous studies using individual wage increment approach for the measurement. Social welfare benefits reported in this paper encompass the overall effects of labor force quality improvement on real GDP growth. Social returns from Hong Kong's investments in higher education calculated using the production function approach are significantly larger than those computed using the wage increment method. Our results also show that social returns on higher education investments in Hong Kong have declined rapidly over the last 10 years.
This paper utilizes principal component regression analysis to examine the relative contributions of 11 ranking criteria used to construct the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) tier rankings of national universities. The main finding of this study is that the actual contributions of the 11 ranking criteria examined differ substantially from the explicit USNWR weighting scheme because of severe and pervasive multicollinearity among the ranking criteria. USNWR assigns the greatest weight to academic reputation. However, generated first principal component eigenvalues of tier rankings indicate that the most significant ranking criterion is the average SAT scores of enrolled students. This result is significant since admission requirements are policy variables that indirectly affect, for example, admission applications, yields, enrollment, retention, tuition-based revenues, and alumni contributions.
This paper constructs a model of saving for retired single people that includes heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies, and bequest motives. We estimate the model using Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old data and the method of simulated moments. Out-of-pocket medical expenses rise quickly with age and permanent income. The risk of living long and requiring expensive medical care is a key driver of saving for many higher-income elderly. Social insurance programs such as Medicaid rationalize the low asset holdings of the poorest but also benefit the rich by insuring them against high medical expenses at the ends of their lives. (c) 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
The article examines the relative contributions of human and physical resources in the production of private undergraduate education. The research methods are noteworthy in three respects. First, the theoretical orientation emphasizes interdependence among inputs and outputs in higher education. The significance of simultaneity among quality students, faculty and institutional output is demonstrated via a three-stage least-squares technique. Second, the study introduces an output variable reflecting the quantity and quality of institutional production. Finally, the exclusive emphasis on private undergraduate institutions offers a well focused perspective for policy decisions in this area of higher education.
This paper uses data from the state of Michigan and a translog cost function to estimate and compare three measures of elasticities of factor substitution — Allen, Morishima and Shadow — in the production of education. We find that the magnitudes of the calculated values of each of the three elasticities are different from the others. While theoretically, the three measures of elasticities of substitution differ from each other, we find that all three calculated elasticities of factor substitution classify all inputs as substitutes. Differences among the different measures of elasticities of substitution are consistent with our finding that the education production function is not of the Cobb-Douglas functional form — a functional form that makes all three measures of elasticities of factor substitution equivalent.