What If We Ranked Colleges on Voting Rates?

"Rating colleges against each other is a tricky enterprise on a good day. For community colleges it's particularly vexed, given how intensely local they are and the simple fact that most of them don't compete with each other. If, say, a community college in Illinois or Arizona does something terrific, I don't feel threatened by it; our students in Pennsylvania aren't going to move there in large numbers based on ratings."

"Still, the lure of lists is powerful. The new Carnegie classifications, as outlined by Inside Higher Ed, rate community colleges largely by the subsequent earnings of their students compared to local labor markets. The article outlines one key objection based on economic geography: In some parts of the country, the median wages and cost of living are so high that even students coming out of very successful vocational programs will struggle economically at first."

"It's similar to the objection I noted a few years ago to the "social mobility" ratings that Washington Monthly offered, in which colleges were graded based on how many quartiles of income their students jumped. To score really well on that metric, you'd better have most of your students start in the bottom quartile. A college located in an area with more students in the second quartile simply couldn't compete, no matter how well it did its job."

Rating colleges against each other is difficult, and community colleges present special challenges because they are intensely local and seldom compete across regions. New Carnegie classifications measure community colleges largely by the subsequent earnings of their students relative to local labor markets. That approach can penalize colleges located in high‑wage, high‑cost areas where even successful vocational graduates may still struggle economically at first. Earnings‑based metrics can mirror problems with social‑mobility measures that favor institutions enrolling large numbers of lowest‑income students. Measurement error arises from geographic wage differences and from failing to capture transfers and non‑income outcomes. Income matters but is not the sole relevant outcome.

Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs