City Journal Introduces Data-Driven College Rankings System

City Journal Introduces Data-Driven College Rankings System

City Journal is just the type of trustworthy outlet to do this fairly.

From City Journal:

Introducing the City Journal College Rankings

Higher education is in crisis. Once considered a pinnacle of American achievement, our universities today face a historic deficit of public confidence, driven by the perception (and reality) that academia has prized political activism over truth-seeking.

With pressure mounting from students, parents, alumni, and policymakers, now is a time of great uncertainty for the American university—yet also an opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and reform. Some elite universities seem bent on discrediting themselves; others stand out for their efforts to enact meaningful change. In a telling trend, a growing number of students now flock to Southern universities, many of which, unlike their Ivy League counterparts, have preserved or expanded their commitments to open inquiry, intellectual pluralism, and critical thinking.

Yet too many Americans remain guided by the old markers of prestige. The brightest students often assume by default that the best education will come from a Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. These same institutions continue to exert disproportionate cultural and professional influence. These legacy elite schools remain well-positioned primarily because everyone sees them as the best, not because they are actually providing the best undergraduate education.

In other words, we find, at present, a mismatch between reputation and reality. This is due, in part, to the fact that prospective students and parents lack access to the information they need to determine which school is best for them. As Americans rethink higher education, they need new tools to help them make better decisions.

The most well-known college-ranking schemes offer conventional answers to questions about “America’s best colleges” because they lack an understanding of the purpose and effect of higher education. Education is an activity that shapes the soul, as ancient writers would have put it. For better and for worse, college shapes students’ minds, characters, and futures; but the well-known college-ranking schemes focus on factors that tell you almost nothing about how attending a particular college will affect your life. They reveal little to nothing about the content of the education that you’ll receive, the classroom and campus environment that you’ll encounter, and the values that will surround you. A reliable university evaluation tool should be organized around these factors.

City Journal now offers such a tool. In consultation with our friends at the National Association of Scholars, we have put together the first genuinely holistic evaluation of America’s most prominent schools. We have collected data on 100 colleges and universities that receive high scores in other ranking systems, that are widely known to the American public, or that have major regional significance. We are unaware of any college-ranking system incorporating a greater number and variety of factors than the City Journal College Rankings—68 in all. Combining statistics from government sources with metrics from other ranking systems, our approach synthesizes existing data to shed new light on major American colleges and universities.

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