THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S COLLEGE RANKINGS ARE RIGGED. As part of TAPPED's continued commitment to counter-counterintuitivism I should point out that the "research" component of the Washington Monthly's much ballyhooed alternative college rankings are deliberately rigged in favor of large schools:
A school's research score is also based on three measurements: the total amount of an institution's research spending (according to the National Science Foundation); the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded by the university; and the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject. For national universities, we weighted each of these components equally to determine a school's final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, which do not grant doctorates, baccalaureate PhDs were given double weight. As some readers pointed out last year, 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.[emphasis added]
That justification is powerfully lame. Is a school with 50,000 students and $500 million dollars in research spending doing more for the country than one that has 5,000 students and $250 million in spending? The rankings are ostensibly meant to help "alumni wanting to get a sense of their alma maters' commitment to the public interest" and "elected officials trying to think of ways to get more bang for the public bucks they're charged with spending on higher education." Yet wouldn't either of those groups care more the efficiency of the university than its overall size? Isn't a college that is small but extremely efficient at producing research more admirable than one that is vast, but only spends a small part of its resources on research?
My guess is that the decision not to control for size is a deliberate attempt to promote state schools. If size was taken into account, the overall rankings would almost certainly look more like the U.S. News rankings and therefore garner less attention for the Monthly. A less counterintuitive result would be less interesting and therefore less attractive to the Monthly's editors.
--Sam Boyd
