Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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High school students still debating which college or university to attend in the fall have some new information at their fingertips. Unfortunately, the information, provided by an organization with conservative ties, doesn’t shine a favorable light on most Iowa institutions of higher education.
Richard Vedder, director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) writing for Forbes, took a direct swipe at the popular college and university rankings produced by U.S. News & World Report, saying the “rankings ought to get a D.”
While the U.S. News rankings didn’t give Iowa institutions glowing marks, both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University ranked in the top 100. Iowa ranked 64th while Iowa State ranked 85th on the list of all national universities. On the list of national public universities, Iowa ranked 24 and Iowa State ranked 38. Both have significant slips backward in the rankings compiled by Vedder and CCAP.
“We start with the premise that consumers want two things when they buy a good or service,” Vedder wrote in an announcement on the CCAP blog. “First, they want to be satisfied using the good — it is easy to use, safe, etc. Second, they want it to do the job for which it is intended. We think ratings of colleges should reflect how colleges do in meeting those objectives. The US News rankings are more based on resources or inputs used or on institutional reputation. The two sets of rankings are moderately highly correlated with one another, but there are important differences.”
The CCAP rankings utilized student perceptions gleaned from the ratemyprofessors.com Web site, alumni presences in “Who’s Who in America,” student success in national award competitions, and the probability of graduating from college in four years. In writing for Forbes, Vedder explains that he believes the rankings compiled by U.S. News are the “equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses” instead of rating the actual meal.
The CCAP rankings, however, did offer some praise for two of Iowa’s liberal arts schools. Both Cornell College in Mount Vernon and Luther College in Decorah barely ranked in U.S. News’ top 100. Cornell rose to CCAP’s top 25, ranking 24th overall. Luther didn’t rise quite as far, but moved up 10 slots to number 87 in the CCAP rankings.
Grinnell College, a private liberal arts school in Grinnell, fared much worse, dropping from 11 on the U.S. News rankings to 55th on the CCAP scorecard.
Ohio University, the school where Vedder is a professor of economics, rose on both the national university and national public university rankings.
The CCAP was founded by Vedder in 2006 with a $200,000 grant by the Searle Freedom Trust, founded by Daniel Searle. It wasn’t the first time that the two teamed up. Searle was a large monetary contributor for Vedder’s 2004 book, “Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much,” through a program at the American Enterprise Institute. It was Vedder’s injection of personal conservative ideology in that book that has garnered him criticism as an enemy of higher education.
The attention to the book “got us thinking that there’s really a lot more work to be done,” Kimberly Dennis, executive director of the Searle Freedom Trust, told reporter Doug Lederman in May 2006. “No one
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