College Rankings and Admissions Today

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. On this show, we've been examining the idea of selective college admissions since the Supreme Court's affirmative action decision this summer. We will continue to do that now with two guests on the topics of US News, revising its criteria for ranking colleges. Those rankings help determine how selective schools can be and the topic of affirmative action for men.

On US News, we're seeing changes to the methodology that they use to rank schools now weighing metrics like social mobility more heavily than in years prior. Joining us with a look at how universities are reacting to the new ranking system is Liam Knox, admissions and enrollment reporter for Inside Higher Ed. Liam, thanks for coming on with us today. Hello.

Liam Knox: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Additionally, the end of race-based affirmative action has shined a light on a different unofficial kind of affirmative action that has been taking place for a while. According to The New York Times, colleges have adopted affirmative action for men in response to declining male enrollment and widening gender ratios. Susan Dominus, staff writer for The New York Times joins us to share her findings on that. Susan, welcome back to you to WNYC.

Susan Dominus: Thank you so much, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a look first at the news coming from US News, the college rankings. Liam, what does social mobility mean in the context of college rankings, and how has the decision to weigh a school's social mobility score affected this year's rankings?

Liam Knox: Sure. It's not necessarily a brand-new metric US News is considering. They adopted some extent of social mobility metrics back in 2018, but this year they really amplified its waiting in college's actual standing on the list. They actually called it the most significant methodological change in their history. What it really means is measuring how likely a degree from this college is to bring a student up beyond the economic and social level that their family started at.

Of course, this is going to really benefit schools that enroll more low-income students. Then, of course, that actually produces results that tie them into jobs that allow them to climb that socioeconomic ladder like higher education promises to do. That's not something that the US News rankings, it might surprise you to learn really weighed as heavily before, and so the big impact there is that it's going to privilege these or really benefit public more open access institutions for the first time in a bigger way than maybe some private colleges.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what kinds of schools have risen up in the US News ranking as a result? Looking at the list, the elite schools that we think of as elite schools, Princeton, MIT, Harvard, they're still occupying the top places.

Liam Knox: Yes, they are, and so there's a lot of hullabaloo or a lot of ruffled feathers in the private college space around this, which some people look at the rankings and I think see exactly what you saw and say, "Well, Harvard, Princeton, they're all still right there at the top," and that's entirely true, but there are instances where this change really did make a big difference. City College of New York, the CUNY School jumped up 46 places actually and is now tied with American University at number 105.

Same with San Diego State University, 46 places. Rutgers University at Camden, right over the river there in New Jersey is now in the top 50. You have all of these examples of a shakeup in the middle of the list. Not so much at the very top of the list where the elite institutions as some people refer to them still occupy a privileged place at the top of that ivory tower there. That hasn't really changed. The colleges that fell, some of the private universities that fell, Oberlin, for example, fell 10 spaces, Brandeis fell a significant amount.

They're angry about this, and then you've got open access institutions that are-- I spoke to the president of SUNY Albany who said, "Finally US News is catching up to what we do in higher Ed what's important to us." These more open-access institutions that pay attention to social mobility, where that's the core mission, and yet of course, they're still dismissive of the rankings, the ultimate weighing of these elite institutions more.

Brian Lehrer: Hooray for your host Alma Mater. I want to say I did not plant the response that we just heard about SUNY Albany that was spontaneous on the part of our guest. [laughs] Before we bring Susan into this, let me ask you about that pushback from some schools a little bit more. For example, you quoted Vanderbilt's Chancellor who stated, "US News has set aside well-established and standard measures of educational quality."

What are the standards he's referring to? I guess if we're concerned about the selectivity of colleges and who gets included and who gets excluded, U.S. News feeds the system of what schools can boast such status that they can be more selective. What are these standards that are now being debated as to what actually makes a good school?

Liam Knox: Well, that's certainly the critique that led to the social mobility metrics first being introduced five years ago and then being increasingly amplified was that it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Actually, selectivity is one of the measures that US News uses in its rankings. It really is undeniably a self-fulfilling prophecy, but yes, I talked to the Vanderbilt Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, who had a lot of very, I would say concerns about the research process.

That's something a lot of people also critique US News for is having a process by which they rank these colleges that is actually very muddled and confusing, and at the end of the day serves to present one numeric kind of ranking for a university to try to sum up an entire educational experience and then compare them to each other, which of course consumers are going to look at that as a simple and accessible way to make a decision about college.

Diermeier was really referring to, they've gotten rid of things or they've weighed less things like class size how small, what the ratio is of faculty to students. Of course, small private colleges are going to do better there. Faculty qualifications in terms of the number and level of faculty degrees, again institutions with more "pedigree" are going to have maybe more of those, maybe less adjuncts or less people who have maybe just master's degrees or even associate's degrees in some cases in the case of community colleges.

Then there's also really just the concern that affordability and outcomes, graduation rates, and social mobility are being meshed with those measures of educational quality which aren't really comparable. It's really apples and oranges. It's the point that Vanderbilt chancellor was making.

Brian Lehrer: It almost sounds like a competition between quality of the student experience per those measures versus how much good the school does for the student in the long run in their lives. Susan Dominus from The New York Times, let's bring you into this conversation now. You bring us in your writing to Tulane's campus in Louisiana where women now outnumber men on campus sharing that last year's freshman class was roughly two-thirds female at Tulane. How common is this kind of gender ratio across the nation's universities now?

Susan Dominus: It's very common. That ratio would say is slightly more extreme, but I think most colleges feel that if they can get to 60/40, I'm not talking about the elite schools actually, which really do care much more about an even ratio, but for the majority of schools, if they're at 60/40, 60% female, 40% male, they're doing pretty well.

Brian Lehrer: Are there certain kinds of schools that attract more women than men or should we be looking at something more systemic than that?

Susan Dominus: It certainly is systemic across the board. That said, schools that are known for public health, I'm being told, tend to attract more female applicants or females who enroll. As I say in the piece, schools that have technology in the name or are really known for that such as Carnegie Mellon, those schools also do tend to have even more ratios or even more men.

Brian Lehrer: But nationwide men aren't going to college at the same rates as women, right?

Susan Dominus: That is absolutely correct, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Susan Dominus: There are many reasons for that, but a lot of it is just pure economics. Wages for young people were especially strong during the pandemic and the trade-off of having a job versus the possible debt that you would incur from college for many young men who can typically earn more right out of college that wages issue is even more salient than for young women. There are the kinds of jobs that men tend to go into right out of college, for example, in construction or even joining the police force. Those are more lucrative than the kinds of jobs that women typically get without a college degree right out of school.

Brian Lehrer: Meaning that women economically need college more than men.

Susan Dominus: If they went into the fields that men go into which are presumably open to them they could get away with it but typically they're drawn to other kinds of jobs that don't pay as well. A woman who wants to be a nurse, a young woman who wants to be a teacher, you need a college degree to do those things.

Brian Lehrer: You're right about Richard Reeves's concept of male drift which is preventing some men from attending schools. Can you talk about the idea of male drift?

Susan Dominus: Yes. It's possible that this male drift starts as early as kindergarten. Richard Reeves would almost argue just because some people believe that the schools are set up in general to favor developmentally girls that they develop, they're a little bit more mature a little bit earlier and more teachers are female. There's just a system in which girls have an easier time throughout school. Maybe when they're younger it's a little easier for them to sit still. This has a cascading effect so that by the time you get to high school girls make up two-thirds of the top 10% of graduating students.

They're maybe more engaged and more volunteer work, more pro-social activities and therefore they feel better set up for college. There's a concern that when men don't go to college they're more likely to face higher unemployment and from higher unemployment you have fewer men who marry, who are grounded by family, and from there you just get loneliness and diseases of despair. That's by despair. It starts early, some might argue, and it has really long-term consequences.

Brian Lehrer: Tying this in with selectivity you imply or maybe you even state that the schools that have the luxury of being the most selective I think including the Ivys you were indicating before go out of their way to balance their freshman classes with respect to gender which means that they're practicing affirmative action for men.

Susan Dominus: We haven't seen the numbers in Ivy League schools. It hasn't been released. It's a holistic admission. They haven't released SAT scores by gender so we can't say for sure that at the Ivy Leagues, this is happening. Although we do know that at Brown, for example, they do accept a higher percentage of their male applicants than their female applicants. Now, if we had reason to think that the male applicants were stronger that would be one thing but if anything, based on the statistics we know about who graduates at the top of their class typically you would expect them to be accepting more females, a higher percentage of females than males and that's not what's happening.

It certainly looks like that. There are admissions officers who have worked at elite institutions like Wesleyan and Trinity who talked about an informal system in which there was sort of a general acknowledgment that by being a male applicant you got a little bit of a break just as maybe somebody from North Dakota where there's a low population of applicants coming to the school might also get a break. This idea that it's not always verbalized but they all know they are looking for men and that their criteria might not be quite as strict for the young men that they're admitting as for the young women.

One admissions officer who used to work at Trinity as recently as a few years ago said that sometimes they would go through the admissions process and they would make their picks, they'd advocate for whom they thought the strongest choices were, and they'd be looking at a class that was 80% female which was obviously unacceptable to the administration so then they would go back and look for men whom they'd maybe overlooked in order to make that ratio more even.

Brian Lehrer: If affirmative action based on race was struck down as racism, even if reverse racism, is affirmative action based on gender for men sexism in a way that might violate the civil rights laws?

Susan Dominus: Theoretically maybe yes but this has actually been going on for a long time, this kind of affirmative action for men. So far as I know there was an investigation by civil rights, a committee. No one's filed suit. One of the reasons for that is that race-based discrimination is subject to strict scrutiny, the highest level of scrutiny and sex-based discrimination is actually subject to a lower level of scrutiny. In other words, if you can find a good reason to justify sex discrimination the Supreme Court might be more ready to allow that.

Also, you could argue Title IX. It guarantees equal educational opportunity to women as to men so why are men being privileged in the admissions process? When Title IX passed, some of the most elite schools in the country lobbied very hard for an exemption for private colleges to Title IX in admissions specifically because they didn't want to have to make their colleges 50% female overnight.

They were afraid that their alumni donors would basically lose their minds and stop giving. They even said if we have 50% of our students are female it's going to make fundraising a nightmare because they're going to change their names and when they get married we won't be able to track them down. They were concerned also that women were going to want to study womany things and then that would distract from the resources they were devoting to presumably very important male-type things. Now, of course, that's not turned out to be true, but they won. They got that exemption which is why private colleges, not state schools, but private universities and colleges can practice this with that protection in place.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking about affirmative action for men at American colleges, and we're talking about US News and World Report revising the criteria on which it ranks American colleges with Susan Dominus who was just speaking staff writer for The New York Times who writes frequently about gender and Liam Knox, admissions and enrollment reporter for Inside Higher Ed. 212-433-WNYC. Joan in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Joan.

Joan: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm an adjunct professor and I want to remind everyone that the balance was tipped towards men for years and years and years and women literally only started making parody in the late 1970s, early '80s. Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and they're now just crossing the line over into more numbers for women, but it's been artificially affected from the past. There's no surprise that there's more women in classes now because there's more opportunity open to them and they can accelerate faster. Thank you very much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. RuPaul in Bridgewater, you're on WNYC. Hello, RuPaul.

RuPaul: Hi, how are you? Sorry, I'm a little nervous.

Brian Lehrer: Relax, we're all friends here.

RuPaul: [laughs] My daughter is a senior right now so we're going through the college application process as we speak. It's interesting to me as we look at all these rankings that for a lot of these or for all of the institutions they don't talk at all about professors, the quality of professors in their teaching, things like that. I know a lot of the larger schools and elite institutions, the professors end up a lot of times not actually teaching the course or being more interested in their research, things like that. To me, I feel like that should be something that rankings do take into consideration as one factor because I think that makes a big difference to students who are applying to colleges as well.

Brian Lehrer: RuPaul, thank you very much. I'm going to go right on to another caller. Lauren in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lauren.

Lauren: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to talk about a comment that your guest made before about elementary school. I'm a former high school teacher and I also taught community college. I have three daughters right now in elementary school so I'm really learning about how the system is working on that for that age. I see that in general, I think there is a failure to support the boys in how the system is geared towards their learning. I don't think it's natural for kids to have to sit six hours a day. Some of the students don't even get to go outside during recess the way that our school's structured. Then you get kids who are labeled with a learning disability or ADHD, but just because they can't sit when they're six years old and listen in the same way as a peer, that can just derail their whole education from that very young age.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Lauren: I think that is a problem at that level that sets kids off when they start being labeled and then they just have a very negative feeling towards learning in general. I just think that that whole system needs to be rethought.

Brian Lehrer: Lauren, thank you very much. Liam, listening to the three callers and some of the stretch of conversation I was having with Susan, I'm also thinking back to the previous segment on the show. I don't know if either of you heard it, but we were talking about the drastically disparate unemployment rates between Black men in New York City and other men in New York City.

The Black men having much higher unemployment or out of the workforce rates. I wonder if the disparity in college admissions and college enrollment by gender is reflective of a racial difference. In other words, if we just looked at white men and women, would they be getting into college at the same rate, or don't the statistics tell you that one way or another?

Liam Knox: Well, I actually-- Sorry, go ahead, Susan.

Susan Dominus: No, you go ahead. I think you probably know more.

Liam Knox: Well, I was going to say I don't actually have the numbers in front of me. I think that if I remember correctly, the lowest college-going rate is among Black men. I think that also speaks to a lot of exactly what we've been talking about. Both the job market but also various factors in the K through 12 system. I don't have the other numbers in front of me. I think that is an interesting question to ask Susan.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, you have something on that?

Susan Dominus: Well, all I can tell you is that you have some of the higher gender ratio disparities at historically Black colleges and universities. Whether it tilts the entire ratio nationwide to a significant degree, I can't speak to that, but I can tell you that you do see some of the highest discrepancies at historically Black institutions.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Susan, your piece references a lawsuit filed against the University of Georgia in which three white women claimed the school had discriminated against them on the basis of gender and race leading to the school dropping its policies that privileged men. I'm curious how it is that universities are still able to tip the scales in favor of men given this ruling, as well as the recent Supreme Court ruling ending affirmative action that I asked you about before.

Susan Dominus: Well, it's interesting. Just to fill people in, because to me, it's an incredible fact that the University of Georgia used to give men formalized extra points on their applications, like an extra 0.5 points out of a scale of seven-point something just for being men. That's how concerned they were about the ratio becoming unbalanced and how much they felt they had to do in order to keep it balanced.

As we discussed, state schools probably are pretty nervous, which is why you do have, at state schools, you tend to have, for example, at UVM, it's almost two women for every man at UVM. That's a state school. If you were going to look at an equivalent-sized elite school in the area, it can get away with being closer to 50/50 for the reason I mentioned before, which is that there's an exemption in Title IX for private school admissions.

It's a very particular and specific admissions. It seems to acknowledge the idea that there really could be real educational benefits to making sure that campuses still are gender balanced enough that men, again, this is the fear. We don't know that this is the case, but there is the fear that if they become too female-heavy, that men will not feel it as a place for them and they will stop going altogether, or they will stop applying to the schools where there are too many women.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. David in Yonkers, you're on WNYC. We've got about 30 seconds for you, David. Hi.

David: Yes, good morning. Thanks for having me. This is a very interesting topic. I've been teaching high school for over 30 years in the Bronx. I've seen the disparity in learning that the boys have compared to girls. The boys are not ready for college. No one is really talking about, there was mention of Richard Reeves in his study Of Boys and Men, but no one is really talking about what's happening to the boys that does not allow them to be ready to do the academic work, to be socially competent to do the academic work in college. That needs to be factored into the discussions, Title IX put a lot of emphasis on girls much to the neglect of the boys. I think that that needs to be looked at as well. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you said you've taught at an all-boys school. I'll extend your call by another 30 seconds. What are the big factors that you think educators need to pay attention to with respect to preparing boys for college?

David: Well, I think that there's literature that suggests that there are different learning styles. I know that for a lot of folks that just becomes too close to gender identity. Some of those landlines--

Brian Lehrer: Gender determinism.

David: Absolutely. I think that there's something to that. For some boys they need to be around competent males who can teach them how to be men and how to engage in a way that's not stereotypical. They need to be there for them. There's a lot of stuff that boys need-

Brian Lehrer: David, thank you.

David: -in terms of their developmental stuff. Thank so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Liam, last question and in our last 30 seconds. Given the economic and social factors at play in men's decline in college enrollment, does the school social mobility score in the new formula for the US News College rankings have any correlation with the student body's gender ratio?

Liam Knox: No, I don't think they separate it out by gender. There's an interesting question there, though as to who are they measuring in terms of social mobility. Each school has its own distinct community that they might serve. Especially regional comprehensive public universities might serve specific communities. Whether that's more weighted in terms of one side in terms of gender, probably more likely in terms of race, that the mission might be to help lift them support the workforce and support those local families at the same time.

I think one of the major critiques of US News is it doesn't take those distinctions into consideration in its rankings, which of course, are an important part of its identity and an important part of a student's desire to go there. Susan mentioned boys maybe not feeling like they belong on a campus. There are plenty of students of color who don't feel like they belonged on certain campuses at certain times. That was one of the original rationales for the newer past 20, 30 years of affirmative action before it was struck down. I think those are all issues swirling around these topics here that are worth discussing.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Susan Dominus, staff writer for the New York Times, and Liam Knox, admissions and enrollment reporter for Inside Higher Ed. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Liam Knox: Thank you.

Susan Dominus: Thanks for having us.

 

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