Finding Value in Education
Assessing “value” in education has blasted to the forefront of America's consciousness, and is assessed through a vast and ever-multiplying variety of tests, surveys, and ranking lists. And, while raw data can sometimes provide illuminating tools for understanding, it does not, by itself, provide an accurate reflection of value in education; rather, this raw data should be taken as a place to start, or jumping off point for further understanding.
School Ranking Guides
USNews.com lists the nation’s top-ranked liberal arts schools for higher education in 2008, starting with Williams College (MA). Williams boasts a freshman retention rate of 97%, and an actual graduation rate of 95% (all statistics from 2005). The student to faculty ratio was 7/1 (considered very favorable) and actual full-time faculty employed ranks at 93% (as apposed to adjuncts and other part-time employees, which implies the school takes care of its staff as well as its students).
But such a value-ranked school is difficult to get into, as SAT acceptance was in the range of 1340-1530, with an over-all acceptance rate of only 19%. The following schools are ranked on the same statistics, and they are listed in order of ranking: Amherst College (MA), Swarthmore College (PA), Wellesley College (MA), Middlebury College (VT), Carleton College (MN), Bowdoin College (ME), Pomona College (CA), Haverford College (PA), Davidson College (NC), and Wesleyan University, (CT), rounding out the top ten.
Kiplinger online lists The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as its number one value-ranked school, although the school perennially shows up in almost all top rankings, with a student/faculty ratio of 14:1 (2006/2007) and an in-state tuition around $13.5 thousand for in-state students. And the percent of student cost met by financial aid was listed as sparkling 100 percent. It is also worth noting that the school has held its "top-of-the-hill" ranking for two consecutive years in this poll.
UNC also shows up in best valued Liberal Arts Schools and Universities list published by the Princeton Review online. Some other schools that made the Review's robust 165-school list are as follows and were picked at random (no order of ranking):
- Colorado State University
- Amherst College of Massachusetts
- University of North Carolina
- Bowdoin College of Maine
- Reed College of Portland, Oregon
- Thomas Aquinas College of California
- Webb Institute of New York
- Stanford University of California
- Dartmouth College of New Hampshire
Speaking of random, Campusdirt.com has even taken the liberty of organizing ranking lists by search criteria, providing for some interesting, if not illuminating, search results. The most close-knit student populations, for example, can be found at Rochester College, Virginia Military Institute, Colby College, Norwich University, and Southwestern University, just to name a few.
Making Sense of the College Guides, Lists, and Rankings
But all of this ranking by itself can get confusing, and number, no matter how impressive and overwhelming at first, should not be to only measure of a valuable education. More important is to look for schools that appear on multiples ranking lists, and identifying schools fo further investigation: campus visits, staff emails, admissions calls, etc. For though the country is recently much about objectively measuring “value” in education, the real value of an education is in what you get out of it.
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