America's worst colleges.

AuthorMiller, Ben

WE SET OUT TO MAKE A LIST OF THE POOREST-PERFORMING COLLEGES. WHAT WE FOUND IS THAT, WHILE GOOD SCHOOLS ARE BASICALLY ALL ALIKE, EVERY CRAPPY SCHOOL IS CRAPPY IN ITS OWN WAY.

Every year, America's media outlets devote gallons of real and digital ink to parsing America's "best colleges." As application and acceptance deadlines near, countless stories, blog posts, and journal entries appear, following well-off students and documenting their fears about landing spots in their dream schools. The market for information about top colleges--who gets in, who is left out, what happens inside--seems bottomless.

Yet the truth is that students choosing among selective schools are making largely inconsequential decisions. Whether it's a northeastern private college, a well-regarded midwestern public institution, or some other school rich with financial and reputational resources, any option will provide students with what really matters: overwhelmingly high odds of graduating from a well-recognized college. For them, even the dreaded "safety school" is likely still a better option than the best choice available to large numbers of students.

Less-fortunate students, by contrast, are often forced to choose among the many colleges that get lumped into broad lower tiers on best colleges lists, or from private for-profit colleges that are not even ranked at all. Many of these colleges are dropout factories, where students are unlikely to graduate and prices, debt levels, and student loan default rates are high. For these students, the crucial question is where not to go to college. When you're wandering through a minefield with destructive options that lead to high loan debt and no degree, it's worth having a map.

Yet the newsstands don't sell guides to America's worst colleges. Nobody writes stories about high school seniors beset with anxiety about whether to attend a community college with a rock-bottom graduation rate, a nearby private college with shaky finances, or a shady for-profit institution. The few rankings that even broach the subject tend to be either mildly humorous attempts from a decade ago ("Worst Trust-Fund-Baby College") or ones that turn upside-down a list that started out as another best colleges exercise.

Worst colleges lists are uncommon in part because they represent a more difficult analytic challenge. The indicators that put a college on the top lists tend to be highly correlated at the top end. A school that takes one out of every ten applicants and sits on a billion-dollar endowment is very likely to have low class sizes, high SAT scores, and high graduation rates. The rich tend to be rich all around.

It's not so simple on the other end. Some nonselective colleges produce admirable graduation rates at an affordable price to students. Others are lucky to see one-fifth of starting students on through to graduation. Some charge sky-high prices and graduate students with large amounts of debt while others may be quite cheap.

Creating a list of the worst colleges also requires making judgments about the importance of different problems in higher education. For example, a worst colleges list has to decide whether a high-student-debt college with a so-so graduation rate should be ranked higher or lower than a cheaper option with minimal debt but even fewer completers. The Obama administration is currently grappling with exactly these problems as it works to create a credible federal college ratings system that could potentially...

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