College quality rankings now measure return on investment rather than education

Evidence

It is no news that European and North American universities have been radically transformed and revalued in recent decades. Rising tuition rates, declining state support, the rise of for-profit and online education, the remaking of universities through corporate “best practices,” and a growing business culture of “competences” in place of “certificates” have cast the ivory tower of just thirty years ago as anachronistic, expensive, and indulgent. While Britain has semiprivatized most public institutions and tied remaining state funding to a set of academic productivity metrics that measure knowledge according to “impact,” the icon of transformation in the United States is a bit different—proliferation of more informal ranking systems proximate to crowdsourcing. Older measures of college quality (themselves contestable insofar as they were heavily bound to the caliber and size of applicant pool, along with endowments) are being rapidly supplanted by a host of new “best bang for the buck” rankings. Offered by venues ranging from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance to the Princeton Review and Forbes Magazine, the algorithms may be complicated, but the cultural shift is plain: replacing measures of educational quality are metrics oriented entirely to return on investment (ROI) and centered on what kind of job placement and income enhancement student investors may expect from any given institution. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 34

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading on information overload and metrics-driven governance; also to broader literature on quantification and audit culture. — connects to: College worth is now judged almost solely by return on investment — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 385
• CANDY: The ‘best bang for the buck’ college rankings are a neat, tweetable illustration of how ROI thinking has colonized even education.

Broader Connections

• College worth is now judged almost solely by return on investment #corroborates (0.95) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 385