Selective Service: which elite colleges send the most graduates into government and nonprofit careers?

• Author: Wenner, Zach

Colleges and universities love talking about service. Their mission statements, fund-raising letters, and soaring commencement speeches all pivot around phrases like "promoting public welfare," practicing "skills of citizenship and community," and solving "local, national, and global challenges." But how do we know whether or not these institutions actually make good on those grandiose promises?

The short answer is we don't. Colleges make plenty of information available about their "inputs" (the SAT scores of incoming freshmen, say, or average class sizes) but little about their "outcomes" (for example, what their students go on to do with their lives). Nor does the federal government provide the public with such information (the higher education lobby makes sure of that). That's a disservice to students and institutions, to the taxpayers who support them, and to society writ large.

The Washington Monthly's annual college guide (published in the September/October issue) pulls together the public data that does exist on colleges' commitment to promoting public service--the percentage of their students in ROTC; the number of their graduates who join the Peace Corps. But what we'd ideally like to know is the number of a school's graduates who go on to serve their country and communities more broadly. That way, citizens could better judge which schools actually deliver on their lofty rhetoric and which don't.

Fortunately, the burgeoning world of social media is beginning to challenge higher education's data monopoly. At the networking site LinkedIn, for instance, millions of Americans advertise their professional accomplishments as well as their college alma maters. Using LinkedIn data, our team at the Aspen Institute was able to measure the top fifty national universities and top twenty liberal arts colleges (as ranked by the U.S. News & World Report) by the percent of their graduates entering public service-in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and public education--over the last ten years.

The results (see page 16) are surprising. Only two of U.S. News's top ten national universities are in our top ten, and only one Ivy League school, Yale, makes the same cut--edged out by places like Brandeis, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. The overlap on liberal arts colleges is a little closer: five of U.S. News's top ten (Swarthmore, Pomona, Carleton, Wellesley, and Haverford) make our top ten. But U.S. News's...