Professor Melissa Bass sent along the following article from the Washington Monthly on how to measure learning outcomes within and across universities. Unlike most other "products," it's hard for anyone to say if, for example, a student gets a better education at UPS as opposed to Lewis and Clark, University of Washington or Georgetown. We have a gut sense of these things and can read about college rankings, but there's little else to go on. That's not to say that there aren't several survey tools used to compare schools across the country. But there's just one catch--schools won't release the findings to the public. So I'd love to be able to tell you how students measure up in terms of workload or ability to read and write, but I have no idea.
Read the whole story here.
Update:
Professor Sousa reminded me that Washington Monthly does their own rankings based on percentage of students in ROTC and the Peace Corps (which they use as a measurement of public service), percentage of federal work-study grants used for community service projects, the total amount of research spending, percentage of students on Pell Grants (which they use to measure social mobility), and graduation rates. Under their system UPS comes in at 57 among national liberal arts colleges, behind Lewis and Clark and Willamette (39 and 40) and Evergreen (50) but ahead of Reed (60). Another way to cut the numbers, if just as subjective.
Update 2: Washington Monthly changes their formula for 2006 and UPS drops some 40 places. Again, more evidence about how arbitrary this can be.
