{"id":58037,"date":"2024-11-01T10:00:26","date_gmt":"2024-11-01T15:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=58037"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:33","slug":"beyond-rank-ambition-can-colleges-save-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/beyond-rank-ambition-can-colleges-save-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first US News & World Report<\/em> college rankings appeared in 1983, the same year I was born. Home was a Pittsburgh suburb situated between one of the region\u2019s richest zip codes and a former steel town named for the company that gave it life, and then left. For my parents, owning a house in a neighborhood located almost equidistant between historical wealth and recent poverty must have seemed sure proof of success; still, even then, the kind of education the US News<\/em> rankings have come to represent remained a conception. My father took six years to complete his college degree, traversing junior colleges and baccalaureate institutions, and navigating roadblocks both economic and academic on the path to completion. My mother, who descended from Lithuanian immigrants, never countenanced such a course. Neither did her three siblings\u2014or, years later, most of their own children, the cousins who constitute my extended family. And so, as I imagined life after high school, college rankings accordingly functioned as key sources of knowledge. My bedroom closet guarded a stack of books built of the Princeton Review<\/em>, the Fiske Guide to Colleges<\/em>, and more than one US News.<\/em> This collection grew with every Saturday-afternoon trip to the local Borders, where the broad wooden benches served as host for hours of browsing the latest lists. My father anchored himself there, poring over the guides as if they had some secret to disclose that only considered study would reveal.<\/p>\n

It was an act of love, I know now. But it was also born of necessity: College rankings stood in as a form of social capital, pointing the way to a life\u2014intellectual, financial, and geographic\u2014few in my family had experienced.<\/p>\n

Casting a clarifying light on the rankings industry, Colin Diver\u2019s 2022 book, Breaking Ranks<\/em>, made me rethink my relationship to it. Across the decades of my adult life, Diver argues, college rankings have amounted to a flawed exercise in \u201cassigning prestige points.\u201d Breaking Ranks<\/em> concludes that it would be better to \u201cignore\u201d them, and that is, in fact, Diver\u2019s primary message to advisers, educators, parents, and prospective college students. As a former college president and self-described \u201crealist,\u201d however, Diver understands that such counsel will be impossible to heed. In fact, Breaking Ranks<\/em> mixes the language of drug addiction with romantic allure to characterize the effect of the rankings industry on the higher education landscape writ large. \u201cThe seduction begins the moment you start to focus on those numbers,\u201d Diver explains. \u201cYou may think that you can treat them just as a starting point, a gateway into deeper, more qualitative explorations. But the promise of being told exactly where each school fits into the prestige hierarchy is often irresistible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracing the \u201cseductive lure\u201d across nearly three hundred searching pages, Breaking Ranks<\/em> reveals just how inseparable a college education has become from the constituent parts of human life in the United States: economic and demographic trends; histories of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of gender, race, and class; and even, as the \u201csiren song\u201d metaphor implies, timeless truths of human psychology. Diver does not blame US News<\/em> and other publications for creating the \u201cunderlying conditions\u201d that have facilitated the \u201ccompetitive frenzy\u201d in which the rankings industry thrives. Decades-long transformations in attitudes about the government\u2019s role in education, the divergence between physical and mental labor in the US economy, and the human constant of a \u201cclassist yearning for prestige\u201d claim responsibility there. But rankings have made those qualities worse, ultimately encouraging us to mistake what should be viewed as \u201ca long-term investment in human capacity \u2026 to lead a fulfilling life\u201d in the rankest terms.<\/p>\n

Especially today, as they strive to achieve levels of diversity that better reflect the world beyond, highly ranked colleges and universities too rarely represent an optimal space of democratic pluralism, laboratories for learning how to negotiate histories of inequality in an attempt to build a more equitable democratic order.<\/p>\n

In a hauntingly prophetic report first issued in 1995, the American Association of Colleges and Universities already observed the decoupling of diversity and democracy in higher education. \u201cDiversity without democracy has no moral compass,\u201d the authors reminded readers, for it is only by way of the standard of \u201cdemocratic values\u201d that society \u201ccan be held accountable for delivering equal justice.\u201d When the report was reissued in an updated form 20 years later, it noted that colleges had fully embraced the study of diversity, but democracy had disappeared from the curriculum altogether.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

College rankings, in Diver\u2019s book, measure all the worst qualities about higher education, and empower the wrong people to form those impressions. It\u2019s a bracing analysis, and one that has brought me to an uncomfortable awareness about the ways the rankings industry shaped pretty much every one of my educational decisions, from my choice about which college acceptance letter to answer to, years later, my decision to leave Pittsburgh, again, and permanently, to attend the most highly ranked grad school that admitted me.<\/p>\n

Was I seduced by money and prestige, which Diver associates with the cultural values of whiteness and wealth? I don\u2019t doubt it. Addicted to the alluring numbers? Maybe. Still, recalling those Saturday afternoons on Borders benches in light of present-day efforts to refocus the civic mission of higher education makes me think there is more to my story, and to the story of college rankings in general. At the heart of Breaking Ranks<\/em>, then, beats an abiding question: What, and whom, is college for?<\/p>\n

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In a 21st-century United States marked by a deteriorating democratic infrastructure whose fault lines run through our college campuses, the question has garnered renewed attention as well as a new urgency. According to one recent survey<\/a>, American adults view higher education as a mark of individual accomplishment; whether higher education is a social good is much less certain. A June 2023 Gallup poll<\/a> found that only 36 percent of respondents expressed confidence in higher education, nearly a 20 percent drop from 2015. Even as they are shaped by partisan identities, these numbers partake of broader trend lines that point to declining trust in institutions. Congress, for instance, landed in single digits in the Gallup poll.<\/p>\n

When George Washington spoke to that body more than two centuries ago, in January 1790, he encouraged the establishment of a \u201cnational University.\u201d \u201cKnowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness,\u201d Washington reminded his audience in his first State of the Union address<\/a>. \u201cIn one, in which the measures of Government recieve their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in our\u2019s, it is proportionably essential.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite Americans\u2019 misgivings, the contemporary university remains an essential institution for democracy. What Washington and the other founders understood about self-government has not changed: Democracy demands a people willing to live democratically, and those people arrive not ready-made but must commit themselves to a process of continuous cultivation. As one historian has put it, \u201cThe quality of our democracy depends on the quality of our citizens.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In Diver\u2019s tale, however, democracy has little to do with the way the rankings industry measures the quality of college education. The origin of the genre explains why.<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n In Defense of Imagination<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Rose Casey <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

One of the first stories about the US News<\/em> rankings appeared in a December 1983 San Diego Union <\/em>column. When Tom Blair reported on the list, he placed the announcement that San Diego State University stood \u201cfourth-best \u2026 among comprehensive universities west of the Mississippi\u201d alongside a series of equally inconsequential news items: an episode of auto vandalism suffered by a Chargers football-team staffer, and the names of the restaurants patronized by the city\u2019s mayor.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Situating college rankings among such social trivia underscores at once the subjectivity inherent in the work of hierarchy making and rankings\u2019 connection to reputational power. As Diver reveals, a precursor to the US News<\/em> regime came in the form of \u201cprivate rankings\u201d that ordered colleges based on the names of graduates appearing in Who\u2019s Who <\/em>lists. And when US News<\/em> published its first rankings in the early 1980s, their data derived from reputational surveys in which college presidents ranked their peers; what a university leader really knew about the schools they were asked to evaluate mattered little.<\/p>\n

That changed in 1988, when US News<\/em> adopted an objective statistic formula for ranking colleges. Institutions self-reported the requested data such as acceptance rates, student-faculty ratio, instructional dollars spent on each student, alumni giving rates, and other empirical metrics. (If a school did not provide the requested information, US News<\/em> supplied its own data, and proceeded to rank the institution anyway!) The publication crunched the numbers, and the formula yielded not only an ordinal number, but also an ostensible objectivity.<\/p>\n

In that first set of algorithmically produced rankings<\/a> in 1988, public institutions\u2014like the University of North Carolina, Berkeley, and Michigan\u2014fell from single to double digits. Suddenly, it was the Ivy League and their kin\u2014MIT, Duke, Chicago\u2014that rose to the top. Also arriving on the scene for the first time were institutions like Vanderbilt, where, roughly a decade later, a combination of financial resources and rankings nearly led me to enroll.<\/p>\n

US News<\/em> found good fortune, <\/em>too, from those early rankings. The publication sold nearly half a million copies of that first issue; soon, the annual rankings list sold more than two million copies. Although I don\u2019t remember if I logged in via my dial-up AOL connection, as early as 1997 the magazine took its rankings to the web, where today illuminated faces of prospective students encounter the information. Following in the footsteps of US News<\/em>, a cottage industry of college guides has joined the endeavor: from Payscale, which ranks schools according to return on investment measured in average postcollege salaries, to the Princeton Review<\/em>, which uses student-reported data to characterize colleges.<\/p>\n

The result? The emergence of what Diver designates as the \u201crankocracy,\u201d nothing more than \u201ca group of self-appointed, mostly profit-seeking journalists,\u201d which has accrued the status of a \u201cruling body.\u201d The unelected \u201carbiters of educational excellence in our society,\u201d the rankocracy has attempted to bring order to what simply cannot be\u2014or, at least, shouldn\u2019t be\u2014ordered.<\/p>\n

And the sovereign\u2019s success is all too clear. According to one study that appears in the citation-rich Breaking Ranks<\/em>, students indicated that they chose to attend Colgate University over the other schools they were considering simply because of its higher ranking. Even more well-documented is the way the rankings regime influences the behavior of college leaders, with about half admitting that they actively seek to raise their institution\u2019s status.<\/p>\n

In September 2023, the chancellor and provost of Vanderbilt courted controversy when they lambasted recent changes<\/a> to the US News <\/em>algorithm, resulting in the university dropping to 18th place, five spots down from its previous ranking of 13. In an email to alumni<\/a> the leaders complained that metrics that track social mobility and student debt confuse a \u201cpolicy concern with measures of education quality.\u201d \u201cAs a research university, we are particularly distressed by the lack of rigor and competence that has increasingly characterized U.S. News\u2019<\/em> annual lists.\u201d Readers of Breaking Ranks<\/em> will find such a statement as problematic as it is predictable. As Diver tells the story of the rankings industry\u2019s rise, the attempt to order something like a college education leads inevitably to the jockeying of positions within an overall \u201ccompetitive frenzy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps most striking is the way this state of affairs reduces the vast postsecondary educational landscape to roughly one thousand selective schools. As the preface to Breaking Ranks <\/em>points out, the other six thousand institutions\u2014the schools that educate most students\u2014get left behind, or below, in the college rankings game.
\n<\/p>\n

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Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

History remains largely recessed in Breaking Ranks<\/em>, but the late 20th-century moment in which the rankocracy consolidated its power matters. The rise of US News <\/em>coincided with the Reagan-era retreat from federal government spending and the slashing of financial aid. The Pell Grant, a form of need-based aid that emerged from the 1960s-era Great Society programs, paid for less and less of the sticker price of college attendance. States, too, slashed support for public universities. Conceptually, the changes spoke to a crucial shift: college education is a private, rather than public, good.<\/p>\n

As the 2023 Gallup polls testify, the implications of that paradigm shift ripple today. In a truly vital book What Universities Owe Democracy<\/em><\/a>, Ronald Daniels, with coauthors Grant Shreve and Phillip Spector, charts the grave consequences for American civic life. \u201cI have become more and more desolate about the civic literacy of students entering our universities,\u201d confesses Daniels, who is president of Johns Hopkins University. Entering students are \u201cwoefully undereducated in democracy\u2019s core precepts,\u201d he continues. \u201cGiven the perilous state of our democracy, this is an astonishing state of affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alarming, surely\u2014but trends in civic education make the path toward this state of the union seem less astonishing than unavoidable. Measured in dollars, the US government funds K\u201312 civic education at $0.15<\/a> per student (recently up from $0.05). By contrast, as of 2023, it spends $54 per student on STEM education, a field of study that is surely necessary for 21st-century life, but which studies<\/a> have shown does not prepare young citizens for engagement in democracy in the way that the humanities and social sciences do.<\/p>\n

Given this deficit at the K-12 level, higher education might endeavor to redress the imbalance. As Daniels, Shreve, and Spector reveal, however, college \u201ccurricula have abdicated responsibility for teaching the habits of democracy.\u201d In the place of an education in and for democracy, US colleges and universities have, since the 1980s, embraced a version of civic education centered on volunteering and community service programming, which often goes under the heading of \u201cservice learning.\u201d In one of the most trenchant insights of the book, the authors argue that the service-learning regime effectively severs civic<\/em> life from political<\/em> life. The problematic effect is that students learn \u201cto engage the communities around them<\/em>\u201d but not \u201cto engage the democratic systems through which they self-govern<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

A commitment to volunteerism certainly can coexist with democratic knowledge. Now, however, what\u2019s needed is a collective educational effort aimed at cultivating the latter. Citizens must understand the structures that make democracy work\u2014or not work\u2014both to participate in everyday democratic decision-making and to contemplate efforts<\/a> at democracy renovation.<\/p>\n

A 2023 study<\/a> of the civic attitudes of young adults spearheaded by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars offers an illuminating case study of the problem and the potential. Of the roughly four thousand 18-to-24-year-old Americans surveyed, only 4 percent of respondents provided correct responses to all multiple-choice-style civics questions. Among them were \u201cWhich political parties currently hold the majorities in the US Senate and US House of Representatives?\u201d and \u201cWhat is the primary purpose of the US Electoral College?\u201d Intriguingly, survey participants who struggled to answer these civic-knowledge questions were more likely to define democracy by invoking values such as justice, equality, and fairness, whereas those who showed higher levels of civic knowledge recurred to institution- and procedure-based answers to signal what democracy is and means (elections and rule of law, for instance).<\/p>\n

The divergence between these responses is noteworthy. Given that democracy is founded upon abstractions, justice and fairness are vital concepts, indeed. Yet, citizens also need to know how <\/em>to activate such values: how to bring them to life so that people can feel and touch them, make bread and build bridges from their promise. And that kind of knowledge requires citizens to understand institutional systems, the vehicles to realize such values. As important, citizens must diagnose the ways the vehicles might need to change.<\/p>\n

The survey revealed another pattern: respondents\u2019 education level was not a statistically significant variable. Whether someone went to college did not impact their civic-knowledge score. The same held true for the number of civic activities they engaged in. When I first scanned the data, I thought I must be misreading it. But Dr. Jessica Sutter, at the time the chief of civic learning initiatives at the Institute, confirmed. \u201cFrankly, we were as surprised as you are,\u201d she remarked in an October 2023 email.<\/p>\n

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Enter the \u201cdemocracy requirement.\u201d Among the many provocative proposals that span the pages of What Universities Owe Democracy<\/em>, the recommendation most deserving of further attention is the call that \u201cevery college and university \u2026 plant a stake in the ground for democratic education with a requirement ensuring that students make contact with an education tailored toward questions of democracy.\u201d As examples, the authors point to Stanford\u2019s Civic, Liberal, and Global Education requirement<\/a>, which includes a course on 21st-century citizenship, a rethinking and revision of the aims of the Western Civ course that used to serve these purposes, and the University of Virginia\u2019s general education curriculum focused on \u201cengagements\u201d with the sort of knowledge required for sustaining liberal democracy also receives mention.<\/p>\n

Yet, in acknowledging the slow pace of change in higher education, and the curricular conflicts that invariably emerge from attempts at such change, the authors leave the \u201cdemocracy requirement\u201d mostly gestural.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has served on a department or college curriculum committee will understand why. If instituting a democracy requirement on one college campus conjures countless faculty meetings and endless service obligations, scaling up a mandate of that kind across the higher education landscape feels even more daunting. Still, the \u201cdemocracy requirement,\u201d even as an idea, invites needed discussion of the role colleges and universities might play in recent national efforts to ask what it means to educate young people for citizenship and to forge much-needed common purpose<\/a> across various national divides. The primary education system tends to take top billing in these initiatives, as in a new national effort<\/a> to recenter democracy education in K\u201312 schools. But colleges and universities\u2014and educational institutions of all stripes\u2014have a part to play as well, for an education for democracy cannot end with high school graduation.<\/p>\n

As Astra Taylor has argued, to remind ourselves of the kind of work democracy demands, we\u2019d be better off ditching a well-worn for the less familiar, but truer, turn of phrase: What we need now to secure and ensure democracy is not \u201cFounding Fathers\u201d (Washington\u2019s national university aside), but \u201cperennial midwives.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Within a democracy committed to seeking common knowledge as a means of securing shared happiness, colleges, in addition to primary schools, have a responsibility to educate<\/a> midwives.<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Mitchell <\/a>\n \n Mitchell L. Stevens <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance? In its very language, Diver\u2019s rankocracy<\/em> suggests the answer is no; but the authors of What Universities Owe Democracy<\/em> are more sanguine. To Daniels, Shreve, and Spector, the \u201ccompetitive impulse\u201d that Diver despises can be directed toward ends both vicious and virtuous. Where the Vanderbilt leaders lambasted the US News<\/em> social mobility metric, Daniels, Shreve, and Spector argue that data point proves that rankings \u201ccan be steered toward either mobility or immobility; toward access or exclusivity; toward merit irrespective of background or the consolidation of privilege.\u201d \u201cIt is, at least in part, a matter of design,\u201d the authors conclude.<\/p>\n

University of California, Riverside, Chancellor Kim Wilcox thinks that the design can be democratic. Advising university leaders to \u201creform\u201d rather than \u201cretreat\u201d from college rankings in a recent letter<\/a>, Wilcox shares how he advocated to make the US News <\/em>college rankings reflect the values of a public university like Riverside, where about half of the student population is first-generation and low-income. Post\u2013Wilcox\u2019s intervention, Riverside\u2019s ranking rose from 121 in 2015 to 85 in 2019. That same year the university climbed to the top of the social mobility charts. For Wilcox, the moral of the story is that \u201cno amount of performative \u2018withdrawing\u2019 will interrupt college rankings.\u201d Rather, the aim must be to get \u201cfair-minded rankings that motivate universities to achieve high scores on the measures that should matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another conclusion also is clear. Although Wilcox doesn\u2019t use the word, he narrates his leadership process like a democratic fable: from conflict to engagement and deliberation and, ultimately, change.<\/p>\n

What might such a democratized rankocracy (a dem<\/em>ocracy?) look like from the perspective of students, the person I was nearly two decades ago, studying and trying to learn about the world of college? Near the end of Breaking Ranks<\/em>, Diver maps out one such pathway. \u201cIf there were college rankings,\u201d he writes, \u201cthey would be multiple, equally credible ones, each addressing a particular educational style or goal.\u201d In his individualistic vision of college choice, Diver even allows for wealth-based rankings, the right \u201cmatch\u201d for those seeking \u201cprestige.\u201d Rankings for those who seek \u201cracial and ethnic diversity\u201d in their educational experience would be available, too. The point is to allow \u201cprospective college students\u201d to \u201capproach the choice of where to apply as an exercise in personal discovery and fulfillment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet that proposal does not wholly harmonize with Diver\u2019s goal of democratizing college education\u2014or, as he terms it, \u201cof achieving social and racial justice.\u201d That Diver chooses to name his most ambitious aims not by invoking democracy but rather in value terms is noteworthy considering the findings of the 2023 Citizens & Scholars survey, where young people articulated the meaning of democracy not by identifying procedures of institutions, the domain of civic knowledge, but by way of values. Clearly racial justice is <\/em>a democratic value as well as a necessary design feature of democracy. And yet, that democratic value still awaits its vehicle; as the brilliant democratic thinker Danielle Allen reminds<\/a> us, \u201cThe world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality, and economies that empower all have been achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Creating such an order requires an understanding, first, of why racial justice matters in and to democratic systems, and, second, of how <\/em>we can design such systems to achieve just ends across racial difference. It will require us, in other words, to name democracy as a goal and value in and of itself.<\/p>\n

That Diver does not do so, despite what are his clear democratic intentions, speaks to the broader silence about democracy that marks contemporary public discourse as much as the classrooms of the academy. It is a truism that the college campus is the most diverse community students will be part of\u2014perhaps their first, and last, such experience. Yet it is also the case that, as Daniels, Shreve, and Spector remind us, bringing a diverse group of people together in one space matters little if genuine \u201cencounters\u201d across this diversity do not occur.<\/p>\n

Today, the students and faculty who compose the higher education landscape largely live in that same world, where the organizing work of race- and gender-based movements capture more attention than, say, matters of who controls Congress, or the last time we amended the Constitution. But as the authors of What Universities Owe Democracy<\/em> as well as emerging initiatives to recenter the college curriculum on civic learning<\/a> suggest, opportunities abound to connect the aims of those movements with democratic systems and structures that facilitate the ends of justice they seek, if faculty, students, and parents are willing to place civic participation at the heart of a college education. Such a shift may even invite dialogue with more skeptical Americans, young and old, who wonder about the values of such activism in a system founded on the promise of representation.
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What, and whom, is college for?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

And maybe, if rightly designed, college rankings can help, not hurt, in the effort. Even if Diver\u2019s vision of college rankings as part of a student\u2019s journey toward \u201cpersonal discovery and fulfillment\u201d misses something crucial, it provides a partial starting point. For democracy matters precisely because that system of government is the best way to secure human flourishing. As Allen has recently argued in a major work of political philosophy, Justice by Means of Democracy<\/em><\/a>, the task of 21st-century citizenship is to find ways to bring that promise of flourishing to life, not for the few but for the many.<\/p>\n

That work begins, Allen contends, with \u201cauthentic and equitable\u201d citizens, people who are \u201cclear about what matters to them and why.\u201d After all, the entire \u201cpoint of civic and political engagement simply is<\/em> the pursuit of one\u2019s purposes.\u201d But democracy can\u2019t stop there\u2014doing so only leaves us, at best, with the student who browses the US News<\/em> rankings looking for the college that gets them closer to their own goals, whether they be wealth accumulation, a particular vocation, or commitment to a cause.<\/p>\n

By contrast, a democratically attuned ranking would take the next step of connecting one\u2019s own \u201cpurposes with those of others.\u201d For Allen, this \u201crelational challenge\u201d of democracy is what civic education must cultivate. For it requires us to reveal\u2014and seek after\u2014our own aims, while also learning about the aims of others\u2014learning, that is, how an individual exists alongside, in concert and in tension, with other citizens, who also have aims and aspirations.<\/p>\n

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Twenty years have passed from the time when my parents and I consulted the latest college guides. I can\u2019t recall if we read the fine print, or if disclaimers about how best to use that information even existed then. Now, at least, US News<\/em> openly admits the \u201ccontroversial\u201d nature of rankings; on its webpage<\/a>, the publication offers advice that, at the end of the day, does not differ radically from Diver\u2019s:<\/p>\n

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\u2022 Use the rankings as a tool to select and compare schools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2022 Use the search and sort capabilities of the rankings to learn more about different types of schools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2022 Think long and hard about the right place for you and choose carefully.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2022 Don’t wait until the last minute. College matters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2022 Don’t rely solely on rankings as the basis for choosing a college.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The do-and-don\u2019t list boils down to one principle: \u201cStudents should gather information on colleges in a number of ways,\u201d and then decide what is \u201cright\u201d for them.<\/p>\n

But following Allen, and the larger movement to make college campuses more democratic spaces, we should work to add another principle: Do<\/em> find a college, no matter its kind or rank, that will prepare you to participate in democratic citizenship, for that aim is, or should be, the primary purpose of higher education. <\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how I would have responded to that kind of admonition two decades ago. Rankings, as well as financial aid, ultimately led me not to Vanderbilt\u2014whose Southern campus, gorgeous though it was, seemed too strange a world\u2014but to Notre Dame, whose Princeton Review<\/em>\u2013endorsed status as \u201cjock school\u201d gave my marching-band-made frame pause.<\/p>\n

Looking back, I can\u2019t remember now if the idea of democracy was even on my mind as I sorted through the college guides stacked in my bedroom closet. That concern came into focus later, through college coursework on the narratives of American democracy in an English class, and through a philosophy course on poverty and justice, where I sat next to a Peace Studies major whose hat promoted a (to me) unknown Illinois politician: Obama for Senate. The commitment congealed, too, in a first-year discussion group on diversity, run by the physical education department, where I learned that in a school where everyone claimed to be \u201cmiddle class,\u201d the average income of a Notre Dame student\u2019s family circled around six figures.
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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n To Fix the University, Return to Moo U<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Sean <\/a>\n \n Sean Carswell <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n

None of those courses was a democracy requirement. But they clarified for me the aims of higher education. Ranked far above, and before, any careerist or economic incentives was the enterprise of coming to a sense of self by way of real and imagined encounters with people and ideas. Those encounters made me examine my own ideas and commitments, enlarging the only world I had known up to that point in my life.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an opportunity that every college student should have, and it\u2019s one that higher education collectively ought to embrace, and work to extend, to all students with urgency in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

  1. The Drama of Diversity and Democracy: Higher Education and American Commitments<\/em> (1995; Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2011). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Johann N. Neem, Democracy\u2019s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America<\/em> (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. Tom Blair, \u201cLife in the Slow Lane,\u201d San Diego Union,<\/em>\u00a0December 11, 1983. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We\u2019ll Miss It When It\u2019s Gone<\/em> (Metropolitan, 2019). \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":58062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[402,117,422,1097,1042],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1366],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-58037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-college","tag-democracy","tag-higher-education","tag-johns-hopkins-university-press","tag-university-of-chicago-press","section-higher-education"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBeyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy? - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/beyond-rank-ambition-can-colleges-save-democracy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Beyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy? 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