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.