The wrong focus

The Wall Street Journal has just come out with a new college ranking system that explicitly focuses on the return on investment that colleges provide, as measured by the amount of income that a degree from the college adds. This is a wrong-headed focus, because the amount of money people have is really important only in relationship to the amount of money people feel they need. If a college can help students develop value systems which explicitly deprioritize material needs, it can be argued that it does just as much to enrich them as if it helps them earn more money. Moreover, to the extent that a college helps students be satisfied with less, it helps them trim their footprint on the planet and make more goods available to others both in the present and in the future.

Let's be clear, Yale comes in 3rd in the Journal's rankings, well above Harvard, which we always like to see, but UNC slides down to 83rd, which is not the kind of treatment we want to see for the university of the people. But I was surprised to see Babson sneak into the top 10. OK, Babson's a cute little undergrad business school, fine. I'd send my kids to St John's in Annapolis or the desert to read great books long before I'd send one to Babson, and I'd probably hire from St John's too. Kids have the rest of their lives to learn business. The odds that another life phase will expose them to Plato or Bronte is low.

My high level criticism aside, it's undoubtedly positive for there to be a variety of ranking systems out there for colleges, as for anything. There needs to be ongoing dialog about what we want from institutions.