College-Rating Systems: One Size Cannot Fit All

By Ellen McCulloch-Lovell. If you have followed the Obama administration’s new higher-education rating system, you’ve read that its stated purpose is to "measure college performance … so students and families have the information to select schools that provide the best value." In the measures, "value" is measured with statistics that are available to the federal government.
The great number of colleges in the United States represent all kinds of values and approaches: small liberal-arts colleges, large research universities, religious and secular, those that offer professional tracks, those that promote broad and interdisciplinary study, colleges with general studies and other requirements, colleges where students select their own courses, institutions that offer associate degrees, and those that award Ph.D.’s. There is no "one size fits all" measurement for the diversity and range of institutions. More...