Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > August > 11 > Entry
Ohio colleges get some respect
(Move in day 2005 at Miami U. — Ohio’s fourth best college?)
Washington Monthly has an axe to grind. Its editors don’t like the U.S. News and World Report annual rankings of U.S. colleges. Instead of just complaining about U.S. News’ approach, they got a better idea — they did their own list.
And overall, Ohio’s schools come out looking pretty good. Ohio State and Ohio U. are among the big winners. But local colleges Miami and Dayton are among the big losers.
I spotted this first at the Roanoke Times’ Campus Watch blog.
Washington Monthly thought schools should be judged not by academic reputation alone, but by how well they spend our tax dollars. So they looked for colleges that moved kids up the income scale (helping poor kids get rich, for instance), did good research and promoted community service. More on Washington Monthly’s methodology here.
The full list is quite different than U.S. News. Here’s how Ohio schools ranked, with their U.S. News rating in parenthesis:
No. 27 Ohio State University (60)
No. 40 Ohio University (109)
No. 56 Kent State University (Not Rated)
No. 102 Miami University (66)
No. 118 University of Cincinnati (Not Rated)
No. 140 University of Dayton (104)
No. 146 Bowling Green State University (Not Rated)
No. 171 University of Toledo (Not Rated)
No. 179 University of Akron (Not Rated)
No. 205 Wright State University (No Rated)
No. 215 Cleveland State University (Not Rated)
(Image credit: Cox News Service)
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Comments
By Mary
August 14, 2006 6:51 AM | Link to this
Dave and others, there are two relevant articles in Sunday’s Dayton Daily News, page A13, about international students. It is interesting they mention the reputation of America’s educaiton system is a piece of cake.By UDHarvardBC
August 13, 2006 9:29 PM | Link to this
I feel that the ranking methodology is absolutely ludicris and inherently flawed. No offense to Ohio University, it give me a break—to rank it above Princeton and Dartmouth? Ohio State above Harvard? To comment about the need for a “national debate on higher education”—the foundation of American higher education is built upon the autonomous nature of the university. Institutions all were founded with different missions and this is what makes the US system unique. To attempt to impose national standards on institutions would go against the exact premise upon which the foundation was built. As for the amounts that college presidents receive, I would actually say that many are underpaid. College presidents are full professors, many have years of administrative experience (deans, AVPs, etc), and most serve as the main fundraiser for their institutions. So, for example, the president of Penn State University earns around $500,000. In comparison to the amount of money he (and others at comparable levels) has been able to bring into the university through donors, this is a very nominal amount.By Dave
August 12, 2006 9:16 AM | Link to this
Mary, as I stated, I based my observations on being in school now, (plus 30 years of working with graduates from around the world). All agree that US and Ohio schools deserve respect. If “anti-terror” and other factors make it tough to come here, that has NO bearing on whether the schools deserve respect, and no amount of “national debate” to reform the schools can affect “anti-terror” stuff, anyway. And I am speaking of the whole world, not just India.By Mary
August 12, 2006 8:36 AM | Link to this
Relevant editorials in today’s Dayton Daily News about how much some of Ohio’s college presidents are paid. I am waiting for similar editorials on how much college football and basketball coaches are paid. Public education institutions are being exploited for personal financial winfalls at the student and taxpayer expense. As was mentioned in news articles on corporate corruption, greed is addictive, especially among “leaders”, it seems.By Greg
August 11, 2006 10:33 PM | Link to this
The “rankings” are a joke, the methodologies of both U.S. News and Washington Monthly are deeply flawed, and Oldprof makes several good points.By Mary
August 11, 2006 9:26 PM | Link to this
Dave, it would be interesting to understand how you base your comments. Are you considering sources on why foreign students are going to other countries and those who stay in their own countries, or are you just listening to what the students who come here say. Some time ago, maybe a few years, I recall a 60 Minutes or other similar program discussing India versus the US. Supposedly, all their top students for computer engineering stay in country and the ones who cannot get accepted to the universities there come here. They graduate around three times the computer scientists we graduate. I forget all the reasons I read about the declining application rate to the U.S. for foreign students, in general. Maybe one was our steep tuition.By Dave
August 11, 2006 3:14 PM | Link to this
Mary, as I am a current grad student in the US, I stand by my observation. I see it on a daily basis. Our colleges are universities are respected throughout the world.By Mary
August 11, 2006 12:48 PM | Link to this
Dave, I think your perceptions are a little dated. As I understand it, the trend is a lot of foreign students are starting to go to other countries for various reasons. I think there was another article recently in the Dayton Daily News or USA Today about that. It could be the foreign students have come to the USA in the past for a lot of reasons other than academics, such as way of life and follow on work and immigration opportunities. It could also be that U.S. universities agressively recruited foreign students for diversity and their fat out of state or out of country tuition dollars. The terrorism issues and slow clearances to come into our country have also had an impact. David Brooks/New York Times had a column recently in the Dayton Daily News similar to your perceptions and I had a letter to the editor published about the issue questioning some of his points.By Oldprof
August 11, 2006 11:40 AM | Link to this
Gosh, no community colleges on the list? I think we all do a better job of increasing students’ potential, serving the community, and doing research than OSU (noting that doing no research at all is better than doing too much :LOL: ). Seriously though: higher education suffers from many of the same maladies as public education—too many legislative mandates requiring too many administrators; a “voucher system” (Pell and OEI grants) that has raised costs/generated bureaucracy/fallen into abuse again and again for 30+ years now; too much non-education stuff—(Mary, “Sports Illustrated” did an expose on how much money the sports programs lost for colleges—no need to turn to a former English prof when the chief promoter of college football and hoops has tabbed them as money pits!). Sure, let’s have a national debate on higher ed.—but let’s exclude people like the Fordham foundation who have more money than brains this time, unless they want to look hard and realize that higher ed.’s problems are caused mostly by the same sorts of “reforms” that NCLB and Fordham are urging for K-12 education.By Dave
August 11, 2006 11:19 AM | Link to this
Our higher education system has some problems (chiefly costs), but students from around the world continue to fight to come here to our “higher education mess”.By Mary
August 11, 2006 7:30 AM | Link to this
This also ties in with an article on the front page of today’s USA Today about the U.S. Department of Education and Spellings stirring the debate about “higher education”. This is long overdue. I think part of the mess in K-12 has been led by the mess in “higher education” - such as education colleges, edutainment, low accountability of parent, student and tax dollars, what students are recruited and why, and the overall learning environment. The great national debate on higher education is long overdue. Some interesting books that discuss some of the issues is “Beer and Circus - How big time sports have undermined undergraduate education” (written by a former English professor at Indiana University) and the “Game of Life” (written by a former president of Princeton University).