Colleges That Change Lives

 College access. College choice. College application. College ranking and reputation. These are things I spend a significant amount of time thinking about as a student in the higher education program, particularly in my course on enrollment management. here are some of my recent thoughts on college rankings and the mechanisms I believe are more appropriate for evaluating a college or university (at the undergraduate level)
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In the 1980's U.S. News & World Report changed the landscape of higher education and the college selection process by creating a list of college rankings. For the first time, anyone could purchase a list that compared the vastly different institutions of higher learning in America. Initially, U.S. News & World Report's college rankings were based solely on peer assessment. A relatively small sample of college administrators were asked to evaluate the quality of other colleges. Over the years, the methodology has evolved,but the colleges that dominate the top of the list rarely change. So much of the ranking,as evaluated by the methodology (right) is dependent upon the resources that the college has available. The colleges that tend to be ranked the highest are not surprisingly the colleges with the largest endowments.And, completion rates, which are arguably one of the most important measures of institutional quality, make up a relatively small percentage of the ranking.

Because of this, and because I do not believe you can compare such vastly different institutions using a single methodology, I do not rely on the ranking system to evaluate the quality of a college or university. Instead, I look to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE for short), The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS for short) and the Colleges That Change lives (CTCL for short) to learn about what really matters. Instead of ranking colleges, all three of these sources seek to understand various dimensions of quality in higher education. They paint a more holistic picture of the institution that helps people understand what the strengths and weaknesses of any particular institution might be. It is a little more work than simply pulling up a list, but it is much more revealing. on IPEDS, for example, you can view first year retention rates, four and six-year graduation rates and even loan default rates). The list of 40 Colleges That Change Lives helps people to understand what is valuable in undergraduate education.Loren Pope, who wrote the book, Colleges That Change Lives, said that:

"These schools share two essential elements: a familial sense of communal enterprise that gets students heavily involved in cooperative rather than competitive learning, and a faculty of scholars devoted to helping young people develop their powers, mentors who often become their valued friends."

Isn't this -rather than faculty compensation, expenditure per student, or average SAT score- what makes college such a transformative experience?


Here is my one concession to the ranking system. People generally buy into it, and I think that the association between ranking and quality is real in the minds of some employers. It does not have to be that way. If recent graduates seeking employment are able to articulate the value they found in their college education in a way that makes sense to the employer, I think that rankings can g out the window. So, assuming that the applicant can use the cover letter and resume to "get off paper," rankings do not have to matter as much as they do.


For me, the undergraduate experience was incredibly valuable, in part because the University of California, Santa Cruz was the right place for me. It was a community of people dedicated to learning, to creating opportunity for one another and to flexible, interdisciplinary education.My UCSC education continually revamped my writing and critical thinking skills. It exposed me to scholars in my fields of interest with whom I am still very close. It allowed me to take courses in multiple subject areas, to gain valuable work experience, to find value in learning across disciplinary bounds, and to let all of the learning that I was doing interact in such a way that expanded my consciousness and aided in my development as a practitioner and a person. Of the undergraduate institutions to which I applied and was admitted, UCSC was fourth in the ranking. If I had chosen to follow what U.S. News & World Report had to say about UCSC, and about the other colleges to which I applied, I would not have gone to UCSC. To this day, I believe that UCSC was the best choice, for me. It's such a unique school, and one where everyone in the community values one another on a very individualized basis. I love UCSC.

Turning away from my own experience,there is research to suggest that fit and matching are important in predicting student success (you can draw this conclusion from the work of Kuh; Tinto; Terenzini; or Bowen, Chingos & McPherson). College is about changing lives, and it always has been. Everything else flows from this. If the undergraduate experience being offered by a college is valuable to students, they will graduate in higher numbers; they will want to come to the institution; they will be successful there; they will want to engage with the institution long after they graduate.