The College Curious Need New “ESG” Ratings

The publication of this two-parter by the Martin Center reminded me that I had drafted something on the topic of college ratings but dropped it. Here it is for your edification and "enjoyment":

Those interested in attending, or sending their children, to university must decide if the time and monetary investment is worth it and, if it is, where to spend their precious dollars. Strident claims by presumably knowledgeable government officials that student loans should be wholly or partially forgiven suggest that many students made the wrong decision and shouldn’t have gone to school at all, or at least not majored in Oppression Studies at Woke U. Some of the “college curious” may have decided on emotional or other irrational grounds based on family history or an affinity for certain sports, while others were undoubtedly led astray by college rankings.

The notion that colleges and universities can be confidently ranked from top to bottom smacks of deep intellectual hubris. Even the bond rating agencies attempt only to lump securities into classes based on risk of default and often get even that wrong, as anyone who lived through 2008, 1997, 1982, and so forth may recall. To ascertain that institution X is a smidge “better” than Y, the rankers rely upon small changes in various quantitative metrics. Because administrators’ careers and tuition rates often depend upon rankings, those quantitative metrics have been manipulated or even concocted, most recently by Columbia University, the shenanigans of which were exposed by a whistleblower who believes that college rankings are essentially worthless. Before making any decisions, the college-bound at least need to realize that a more highly ranked school may simply be better at gaming the ranking system, at being dishonest in other words.

In addition, properly interpreting many metrics requires context that is not easily quantified. A school with a high 8-year graduation rate (as measured by the Washington Monthly), for example, may have an abysmal unreported 4-year rate, suggesting that it is adept at bilking students for more tuition than expected by making it difficult for them to graduate on time but easy for them to eventually get a degree, perhaps by making courses challenging but pressuring faculty to relax the requirements for students making up incompletes or retaking classes who appear ready to bail. A relatively low graduation rate, by contrast, might indicate that a school is trying to maintain standards and willing to fail out students to do it.

Most importantly, major rankings never include arguably the two most important metrics, learning (what students know/can do upon graduation minus what they knew/could do upon admission) and lifetime earnings. Some measure purported job placement rates and even initial salaries but those skew toward schools with sticky reputations, usually hoary institutions that continue to attract the attention of recruiters from high paying firms because they presumably produced quality graduates in the past. Most of the college curious, however, care more about lifetime earnings than initial salary. Moreover, the trajectory of earnings provides more information about the quality of a school’s ability to educate, rather than to merely train or signal the employability of, their students because it proxies the original stated goals of higher education, which is to cultivate lifelong learning and independent thought, both of which remain essential to a robust private economy and a vibrant civil society.

I first called for such metrics over a decade ago, in a book (Higher Education and the Common Weal: Protecting Economic Growth and Political Stability with Professional Partnerships, 2010) so controversial it could only be published in India and is already out of print. Universities do not want to track systematically the careers of graduates, at least those unlikely to make big donations, or to measure learning because such information might expose their individual and collective weaknesses. Once informed of the industry’s overall ineffectiveness, fewer people would opt for “higher” education in the first place and many others would attend less expensive, but pedagogically equivalent, institutions. That, of course, would tend to dampen tuition, or at least its rate of increase, forcing universities to invest more in pedagogy (and its crucial cognate, research) and less in sports complexes and complex administrative systems. Rest assured, then, that the college curious will never know with certainty which schools are most likely to increase both their ability to earn a living and their ability to positively impact the social sphere.

Rankings, however, do not have to be so rank. To better aid those interested in attending college, a disinterested third party could create a grading system focused on three major cognates of lifetime learning and social and economic achievement. I call it “ESG,” not for the thoroughly debunked environmental, social justice, and corporate governance investment grading system recently popular in Woke circles but for intellectual energy, social engagement, and university governance.

Intellectual energy refers to the atmosphere on campus, including the number of outside speakers and respectful attendees of their talks (not anti-intellectual protestors). Contrast Hillsdale College, where I recently spoke to over two score faculty and economics students on a balmy weeknight during Homecoming, with another midwestern college of similar size where during an otherwise uneventful week only a few students turned out on the same subject (the economics of slavery) and had to be bribed with “extra credit” to sit physically in the room while investigating their social options later that evening on their phones.

By social engagement, I mean old-fashioned civic engagement and well-informed, dare I say research-based, attempts to ameliorate social problems. In other words, schools should be judged not on the extent that they encourage mere virtue signaling, which signals only iniquity and an anti-intellectualism unbecoming any institution devoted to “higher” education. Universities should be judged on the extent that they encourage students to engage in rational action. Society needs the energy, verve, and long-term outlook of its youth but is not aided by inducing young people to slavishly follow fads ginned up by the Left, or the Right for that matter. Universities should inculcate responsible free speech by directing students to research, write, and orally defend their positions before protesting or engaging in other direct action.

The quality of a university’s governance should be assessed by the checks and balances that it incorporates to ensure that it keeps its promises and does not distort its record. As the Martin Center has shown, some schools have forced out tenured non-Woke professors by threatening the budgets of noncompliant departments and members of promotion and tenure committees and by employing non-disclosure agreements in unethical, if not illegal, ways. If accreditors will not discipline, an outside rater should expose such schools because they cannot be trusted to administer donations in line with donor intent, let alone to put the interest of students first during public health or other emergencies.

The college curious need quality university quality ratings like “ESG” because often they do not (yet) have the intellectual tools needed to properly assess the claims that college admissions officers and marketing materials make. Few, for example, understand the implications of public choice theory or its application to public and private university administrators. They do not realize that the beautiful school with the great reputation and super sports teams may be run to serve the interests of administrators, coaches, and, to a lesser extent, faculty, not students. Such institutions of course claim to be student-centered but do not credibly commit to putting students first in any but the most cursory fashion. They may be highly ranked but in the “ESG” system sketched above would be graded low.

In fact, most of America’s colleges and universities would receive a failing “ESG” grade, at least initially, because most have repressive intellectual atmospheres where mindless Woke virtue signaling prevails, implicitly supported by faculty cowed into submission by the ouster of outspoken opponents of the status quo enabled by poor governance practices. FIRE and College Pulse join forces to rank universities on 13 free speech metrics. The rankings are relative, though, not absolute. The fact that the University of Virginia ranks sixth best suggests that the rankings only gauge speech prohibitions and do not measure positive campus intellectual energy (the E in my “ESG” rating) because a recent Heritage report reveals that Virginia’s universities are “drowning in” DIE (diversity, inclusion, and equity) administrators and policies, and that UVA is the second worst offender.

Presumably, though, to attract more students from a shrinking pool some universities will reform to achieve a higher “ESG” grade. Indeed, some new institutions with stronger “ESG” bona fides have formed and a few incumbents have reformed their cultures rather than joining the race to the bottom taking place in standards. American higher education remains sick, perhaps chronically ill, but by exposing its rotten parts while highlighting those institutions that remain true to the industry’s original mission of helping students to become independent thinkers capable of adding value to both the economy and society, it could improve outcomes without further ballooning the national debt.

Let's Ban Professional Sports *2nd Amendment SATIRE*

NB: Tried this at several satirical websites but some of the humor was too high brow. I mean who jokes about the Ninth Amendment?

The government should ban sporting events forthwith because they encourage the consumption of alcohol and other inebriates, gambling, harming animals, idleness, and violence. It doesn’t matter that millions of Americans love to watch sporting events live or on television because sports are not explicitly protected by the Constitution, they divert resources away from BIPOCs, and they emit literally tons of carbon into the atmosphere.  

Anti-sporters like myself have never played or watched any professional sport in our lives, but we know everything there is to know not to like them and that is sufficient to call for a ban. Millions of Americans just like me wonder how long policymakers are going to allow this, this, this genocide to continue. It has got to stop and here is why.  

First, while like-minded allies long ago managed to curtail alcohol sales late in games, all that did was to induce people to start drinking earlier. Now, we’ve discovered via a thorough investigation conducted on Tik Tok, fans show up in the parking lots of sporting events hours early so they can get drunk, gorge themselves on animal products, and likely fornicate too.  

Some might say that impaired driving, not alcohol or drug use per se, kills people and that responsible drug and alcohol use isn’t hurting anyone. Those people are idiots. We don’t have any reliable statistics, but we know that literally millions of babies have been killed by drunk or high sports fans. (Yes, some of those babies may have been squirrels but squirrels are people too!)  

Namby-pamby types will also claim that gambling doesn’t hurt anyone, except the losers, but they knew what they were getting into. But gambling is an addiction, just like drinking and drugs. Again, we don’t have statistics, but we heard an anecdote about a baby run over by a guy checking his phone to see if “da Iggles” covered the spread. We don’t know what that means exactly but we know it is about sports gambling.  

As for harming animals, footballs, we learned on Wikipedia, are made from pig skin. The thought of all those skinless hogs running around somewhere just makes our blood boil. There must be some pretty cold cows out there, too, because baseball gloves and balls are made from cowhide. We’re told that every time a baseball touches the ground, it gets replaced. That’s a lot of baseballs and although cows are pretty big that must be a lot of harmed cows.  

The idleness and violence go hand-in-hand with drinking and gambling. How many trillions of dollars are wasted each year as people watch some guys pat each other’s butts and smash poor balls, or each other? Again, nobody is tracking these things but it is obvious that it is a giant waste.   

It is equally obvious that professional sports are bad for the environment. We can’t find it right now, but we once saw a study that claimed that up to half of global warming is caused by lacrosse alone. 

 If people worked instead of wasting their precious time on professional sports, America could easily afford to pay reparations to BIPOCs and other oppressed groups du jour. The athletes themselves would have to get real jobs too, thus providing even more support for the economy. And taxpayers could stop subsidizing sports stadiums and increase subsidies for worthy things, like NPR and carbon pipelines. 

Banning professional sports might sound unconstitutional. Didn’t the government have to pass an amendment before it banned alcohol? Yes! I’m an expert because I have read the Constitution all the way through, except for the boring and confusing parts, almost three times.  One approach would be to convinces states to ban sports. Start easy, like the Dakotas, which don’t have any sports, except maybe for rodeos. 

Then California because while policymakers there like drug use, they don’t like carbon emissions and need money to pay reparations. The leagues will then lose a lot of their teams and won’t be able to afford to defend themselves in other state legislatures.  Then the federal government could step in under the interstate commerce clause. I couldn’t actually find an amendment saying this, but I have it on good authority that the greatest president of all time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, packed the Supreme Court full of the greatest justices of all time and they all agreed that the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says, it means what they say it means, and they said it means the federal government can do whatever the heck it wants if it affects the economy in any way. If you don’t believe me, ask Farmer Filburn.  

There is an amendment that bothers us, though, the Ninth. It seems to say that people have a bunch of other rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and, taken with the Preamble, suggests that the government ought to leave people to do what they want for the most part. Hardly anyone ever mentions that amendment, though, so we’re guessing it was really about slavery.  

In sum, we don’t like sports though we know nothing about them but we feel that they are bad and are willing to concoct evidence and twist reality to convince a slim majority of our fellow Americans to join us in banning them.  

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and a part time satirist who loves sports and also firearms, which are explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution yet under assault in Massachusetts.