Out With the Old, In With the New: Rating Higher Ed by Economic Mobility
January 27, 2022
With another college rankings season officially under our belts, an age-old question persists: Do college rankings actually reflect the purpose of our higher education system? Or do they just reproduce existing inequities by rewarding the same wealthy, selective schools that primarily serve students who were already set up for success?
The good news is that a handful of well-known ranking publications have recently attempted to address the implications of this latter question by incorporating metrics that look at the outcomes of lower- and moderate-income students into their methodologies. For example, even the controversial US News College Rankings—known to focus more on student selectivity rather than student outcomes—now takes into account the proportion of low- and moderate-income students who graduate from an institution. Some publications have even gone a step further by looking at the proportion of traditionally underserved students who enroll in each institution, in addition to how well the school sets them up to succeed.
Yet, despite these efforts, historical prestige tends to outweigh student outcomes in the most popular rankings, resulting in the same highly-selective and well-resourced schools getting shuffled around the best colleges lists year after year. And instead of questioning why these schools don’t admit their fair share of low-income students or students of color, these rankings continue to reward schools based on how many students they exclude—not how many they truly serve.
We are in dire need of a completely different approach to assessing institutions of higher education. Instead of prioritizing reputation and selectivity, we propose a new rating system known as the Economic Mobility Index (EMI) that attempts to answer the question: “If the primary purpose of postsecondary education is supposed to be to catalyze an increase in economic mobility, which schools are succeeding in that goal?” The following analysis is designed to give policymakers, researchers, and consumers a better way to assess which colleges are delivering on that promise for low- and moderate-income students—and which ones are falling woefully short.
Read the full report on Third Way’s website.
The Economic Mobility Index (“EMI”) reports and metrics were originally developed with and for thirdway.org.
