How to Choose a College - Forbes.com

On My Mind
How to Choose a College
Richard Vedder 05.19.08, 12:00 AM ET


The most popular rankings use the wrong measures.
This time of year, as they make the momentous decision of where to go to college, high school seniors are turning to popular rankings compiled by magazines like U.S. News & World Report. There are competing scorecards from the Princeton Review and Kiplinger's, but U.S. News' product is way out in front in visibility; in addition to its usual circulation of 2 million, it sells 9,000 newsstand copies and some 20,000 of its college guide book.

U.S. News evaluates educational quality by looking inside colleges at measures like faculty-student ratios, admissions selectivity, financial resources and alumni giving.

I think the U.S. News rankings ought to get a D. They're roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses. At the Center for College Affordability & Productivity, a two-year-old research organization in Washington, D.C. with a free-market bent, we evaluate colleges on results. Do students like their courses? How successful are they once they graduate? In short, we review the meal.

Our measures begin with student evaluations posted on Ratemyprofessors.com, a nine-year-old site with 6.8 million student-generated evaluations. We look at college graduation rates (as does U.S. News). We also calculate the percent of students winning awards like Rhodes Scholarships and undergraduate Fulbright travel grants. For vocational success we turn to Who's Who in America. Though imperfect, it is the only comprehensive listing of professional achievement that includes undergraduate affiliations. (Our complete listing of more than 200 schools can be viewed at Forbes.com.)

The top CCAP schools rank near the top of the U.S. News list, as the accompanying table shows. But just below the top there are some surprises. Duke, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania make the top 10 list at U.S. News but not at CCAP. Duke students don't rate their professors high enough. At the University of Pennsylvania not enough grads made it into Who's Who. Brown and Northwestern, both ranked 14 by U.S. News, and Dartmouth College, ranked 11 by U.S. News, all make it onto our top 10. The University of Alabama, which got great reviews from students, came in a number 7 on our national public university ranking; it's at position 42 on U.S. News' list.

The biggest surprises come in our list of liberal arts colleges. Wabash doesn't make the top 50 on U.S. News' list but ranks tenth with CCAP because of the awards its students won and its showing in Who's Who. Several other schools not high on the U.S. News list, including Whitman, Washington & Lee, Barnard and the U.S. Military Academy (a.k.a. West Point), are in our top 10. A number of excellent smaller liberal arts colleges do poorly on the U.S. News list but fare very well on the CCAP list, including Reed (twelfth) and Knox (sixteenth). Like other consumers, students want satisfaction and results, which is what CCAP measures.




For a complete ranking of all national universities, click here

For a complete ranking of all liberal arts schools, click here

For a complete ranking of national public universities, click here

Cleveland Clinic's Medical School To Offer Tuition-Free Education WSJ article

Cleveland Clinic's Medical School To Offer Tuition-Free Education
Move Seeks to Spur
Students' Interest
In Academic Careers
By SHIRLEY S. WANG
May 15, 2008; Page D3

The medical school run by the Cleveland Clinic will offer a tuition-free education, in the hope that a substantial reduction of post-graduation debt will encourage top students to enter academic medicine.

The medical profession has worried for years about how the high cost of a medical education -- newly minted doctors owe nearly $140,000 on average -- influences students' career choices. One-third of medical students surveyed by the nonprofit Association of American Medical Colleges say debt influences their choice of specialization.


In clinical practice, family-medicine doctors in 2006-07 earned an average $161,000 a year, radiologists earned $380,000 and orthopedic surgeons $413,000, according to Merritt, Hawkins & Associates, a health-care search and consulting firm. In the academic arena, median base compensation for family practice is $140,038, orthopedic surgery $205,904 and radiology $272,737, according to the Medical Group Management Association, a professional membership association for group-practice managers.

Interest in academic medicine has been relatively flat for about a decade, hovering around 15%, according to a yearly survey of incoming students. That number fell to 9.4% in 2007 for reasons that are unclear, said Gwen Garrison, director of student and applicant studies at the AAMC.

"[Academic] careers are...very demanding in terms of time," said Darrell Kirch, AAMC's president. "Some students feel that those kinds of demands would be difficult for them to meet while also trying to obtain some sense of work-life balance."

The Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western University will announce Thursday that beginning in July, all incoming students will be awarded full scholarships to cover their estimated $43,500 tuition. Students will still have to pay for living expenses, which the school estimates will be around $21,800 including all fees, equipment and books. The school will reduce by half whatever portion of the tuition current students are paying, after accounting for financial aid.

The scholarships will be funded initially through money generated by the school's operations and endowment, but will be fully funded by the endowment in the long run. Lerner College of Medicine, established in 2004, will require no career commitment or repayment if graduates quit or choose to practice in a clinical setting.

The school's goal is to train physician investigators who teach and conduct research on topics such as new treatments, and executive dean Andrew Fishleder said there is a need for more of these in the profession. The five-year program -- typical medical programs take four years -- incorporates research throughout, and becoming tuition-free was always part of its mission. "We hoped that debt would not hinder their ability to pursue their careers," Dr. Fishleder said.

The move also may attract more applicants to Lerner and make the application process even more competitive, Dr. Fishleder said. The school had more than 1,000 applications for its slots last year, and while the prospect of paying no tuition might attract more top-tier applicants, Dr. Fishleder said the school is already satisfied with the number and caliber of its applicants.

Whether reducing the financial burden will really spur students' interest in teaching and research careers is unclear. Some experts said medical students aren't enticed by the research field for reasons that go beyond finances.

For example, there are many differences between academic medicine and clinical practices that might prompt a student to choose one over another -- lifestyle and work-life balance, amount of patient contact and the nature of the day-to-day work, said Tom Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md..

While Lerner is the first medical school in the U.S. to forgo tuition for all students, other schools also are working to ease the financial burden. The University of Central Florida, which is establishing a medical school, announced in April that it will offer scholarships to its first class covering tuition and expenses. Yale University and some others are increasing financial aid.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com1