How to Rank Universities: Who Graduates the most Ken Lay's?

by: Matt Stoller
Mon Oct 15, 2007 at 11:49:30 AM EDT
In 1901, an army psychologist named Carl Brigham developed the Scholastic Achievement Test for Northeastern colleges as a mechanism to eliminate test bias between people from different socio-economic backgrounds. The modern university system in America, including most of our great research institutions, were founded around that same era, such as MIT and Johns Hopkins - and universities like Harvard reconfigured themselves along somewhat more meritocratic and scientific lines. Pretty soon, a swarm of Jews began infiltrating, and 'character' remained a critical filter into the feeder to the American elite.
Matt Stoller :: How to Rank Universities: Who Graduates the most Ken Lay's?
In other words, the fight over meritocracy in American institutions of higher learning has always been a fight over entrance into the elites. Whose children get to compete to achieve power and success, and who can inherit wealth and success, and who isn't even on the playing field? And as the cost of not being in the Eastern elite has gone up - the widening inequality that started in 1973 - competition has become more and more fierce. Harvard could, for instance, fill its freshmen class with valedictorians. There's a larger trend, and it's not just the disgraceful legacy admission problem. SAT tutoring, which has long struck me as a completely legal industry organized around the principle of cheating meritocratic mechanisms, is a tremendous growth success story over the last 25 years in business, with Kaplan now owned by the Washington Post and contributing a substantial boost to its growth story on Wall Street.
US News and World Report rankings reflect the social biases of modern American culture, they do not create them. There's a reason rankings show Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or sometimes, shocker, MIT or Caltech, as consistently the 'best' colleges. Colleges, aside from whatever educational mission they may have, serve as a social credentialling institution for entrance into elite society, and a parking lot for scholars that have a whole mix of incentives, of which engaging the public in useful work is but one of many. The dramatic increase of legal cheating for those who can afford it suggests that the mission of higher education itself is in deep crisis.
All of which brings me to the Washington Monthly's rankings of colleges