Originally posted on: Forbes by: Matt Schifrin
This is the time of year when high school seniors and their parents
make their final decisions about which college they will attend over the
next four years. It can be a gut-wrenching ordeal especially given that
it now costs nearly $250,000 for four years at a private college. For
many families, it’s a bigger financial decision than buying a house.
One of the perennial topics of discussion among parents and pundits
is which schools provide the greatest return-on-investment (ROI)?
Economists have long debated this and a slew of Web sites and college rankers report stats (including Forbes)
to help you make your decision. Given the obvious affordability issues
and out-of-control student loan situation, the Obama administration
recently launched an interactive College Scorecard
web site to help families make smarter college planning decisions. The
problem with the White House’s new offering is that it gives you little
guidance about the“return on investment” part of the college planning
process. The government’s scorecard web site has yet to report any
specific employment data by college.
I have an idea for an alternative measure to determine the ROI of a particular college and I call it the
Grateful Graduates Index.
It’s a pretty simple formula that measures of the amount of private
gifts given to a four year college over time, divided by the number of
full time students it has. After all, private donations are typically
an indicator of two things: how successful an alumnus is and how
grateful he or she feels toward her alma mater.
The
idea for the Grateful Grads Index actually came from a friend of mine
who is a graduate of Harvard, who had just returned from his 30-year
college reunion. During a barbecue, he asked me if I knew what
Harvard’s core competency was. I replied “Educating super smart
students?” He laughed and replied, “No, it’s getting its alumni to give
donations, they are really good at it.”
My friend touched on an important point. Private
donations are also a function of how proficient a particular school’s
development department is at extracting money from its graduates. But
given how difficult it is to judge the merits of one fundraising
department’s skills over another, my Grateful Grads Index doesn’t adjust
for this fuzzy measure and just looks at the raw donations data.
In the end, the fact that my friend is a very successful surgeon at
prestigious hospital and happily donates to an already well-endowed Ivy
League school gives you an idea of the kind of “return” he feels he got
from attending Harvard. Harvard ranks 8th on our Grateful Grads Index,
right behind Dartmouth College
with a median donation per student of $25,122. My surgeon friend would
be the first to tell you that attending Harvard changed the course of
his life and he shows his gratitude every year.
For the purposes of our Grateful Grad’s Index I used the government’s
extensive online database of information about institutions offering
post secondary school education. I went back ten years, looking only at
private-not-for-profit colleges that offered four-year degrees and had
more than 1,000 full time students. Thus, you won’t see some great
schools on our list like University of California at Berkeley or
University of North Carolina or University of Michigan. These public
colleges file different financial forms so it’s a bit more difficult to
extract the appropriate data.
I also ranked schools by median donations per student over the last decade rather than average donations to avoid the problem of the occasional outliers you get when uber-rich alums like Michael Bloomberg (Johns Hopkins ’64) donate gobs of money in a single year. In 2007 for example, Claremont McKenna College
alumnus Robert Day, founder of Trust Company of the West, donated $200
million to this elite liberal arts school in Southern California. If I
had used average donation per student over the last ten years,
Claremont McKenna would rank second with $36,737 per student in
donations, versus a rank of 17 with a median donation of $17,634 per
full time student.
One other important caveat to our Grateful Grads Index is that
colleges were only required to separate out private gifts from grants
and contracts after 2009. Thus several of years of data we collected
include grants and contracts in the figure and therefore give a boost to
certain bigger research oriented universities like Stanford and Duke University.
However, for nearly all of the colleges on our list, private gifts
account for the vast majority of the “gifts, grants and contracts”
revenue source. In fact for certain prominent liberal arts colleges on
the list like Vassar College, Pomona College and Amherst College, private gifts from grateful graduates account for nearly all of their income outside of tuition, fees and investment returns.
While our Grateful Grads Index contains most of the usual suspects of
the best colleges lists – Caltech, MIT and Stanford top it — there are a
few surprises, like tuition-free Berea College
of Kentucky. Liberal arts-oriented Berea was founded in 1855 by an
emancipation-minded landowner and a local scholar who attracted teachers
from Ohio’s Oberlin College.
The school, whose motto is “God Has Made Of One Blood Peoples Of The
Earth” has graduated such notables as Nobel Prize winning chemist John
Fenn and Nascar magnate Jack Roush.
In some ways The Grateful Graduates Index is a vindication of the old
fashioned idea of getting a good liberal arts education. Our Top ROI
colleges list is chock full of small liberal arts colleges like
Williams, Wellsley and Bard. This may provide some comfort to parents
who have recently sent in deposits and are worrying about the futility
of a liberal arts education versus more practical degrees in
engineering, computer science or say, nursing.
Says John Linehan, head of U.S. equities and portfolio manager at T.
Rowe Price who received a bachelors degree from Amherst College in 1987
and MBA from Stanford 1998 “I am a donor to both, but I actually donate
more to Amherst.” Linehan remembers fondly how other Amherst alums acted
as mentors to him at his first job. “I’ll plug Amherst any chance I
get. It was extraordinarily beneficial to me going into the business
world. My liberal arts background taught me how to think.”
Originally posted on The New Yorker by Nathan Heller
Gregory Nagy, a professor of
classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort
who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the
battles of the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared
Hungarian nose, and a tendency to gesture broadly with the flat palms of
his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and dark blazers that have
replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste. His hair, also
white, often looks manhandled by the Boston wind. Where some scholars
are gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced
exposition. (“There are about ten passages—and by passages I simply mean
a selected text, and these passages are meant for close reading, and
sometimes I’ll be referring to these passages as texts, or focus
passages, but you’ll know I mean the same thing—and each one of these
requires close reading!”) When he speaks outside the lecture hall, he
smothers friends and students with a stew of blandishment and praise.
“Thank you, Wonderful Kevin!” he might say. Or: “The Great Claudia put
it so well.” Seen in the wild, he could be taken for an
antique-shop proprietor: a man both brimming with solicitous enthusiasm
and fretting that the customers are getting, maybe, just a bit too close
to his prized Louis XVI chair.
This spring, however, enrollment in Nagy’s course exceeds thirty-one thousand. “Concepts of the Hero,” redubbed “CB22x: The Ancient Greek Hero,” is one of Harvard’s first massive open online courses, or MOOCs—a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos. A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take MOOCs, you’re expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation. In the end, you’ll pass or fail or, like the vast majority of enrollees, just stop showing up.
Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. “While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.”
Some lawmakers, meanwhile, see MOOCs as a solution to overcrowding; in California, a senate bill, introduced this winter, would require the state’s public colleges to give credit for approved online courses. (Eighty-five per cent of the state’s community colleges currently have course waiting lists.) Following a trial run at San José State University which yielded higher-than-usual pass rates, eleven schools in the California State University system moved to incorporate MOOCs into their curricula. In addition to having their own professors teach, say, electrical engineering, these colleges may use videos by teachers at schools such as M.I.T.
But MOOCs are controversial, and debate has grown louder in recent weeks. In mid-April, the faculty at Amherst voted against joining a MOOC program. Two weeks ago, the philosophy department at San José State wrote an open letter of protest to Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor whose flagship college course, Justice, became JusticeX, a MOOC, this spring. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than “a glorified teaching assistant.” They wrote, “The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”
Nagy has been experimenting with online add-ons to his course for years. When he began planning his MOOC, his idea was to break down his lectures into twenty-four lessons of less than an hour each. He subdivided every lesson into smaller segments, because people don’t watch an hour-long discussion on their screens as they might sit through an hour of lecture. (They get distracted.) He thought about each segment as a short film, and tried to figure out how to dramatize the instruction. He says that crumbling up the course like this forced him to study his own teaching more than he had at the lectern.
“I had this real revelation—I’m not saying ‘epiphany,’ because people use that word wrong, because an epiphany should be when a really miraculous superhuman personality appears, so this is just a revelation, not an epiphany—and I thought, My God, Greg, you’ve been spoiled by the system!” he says. At Harvard, big lecture courses are generally taught with help from graduate students, who lead discussion sessions and grade papers. None of that is possible at massive scales. Instead, participants in CB22x enroll in online discussion forums (like message boards). They annotate the assigned material with responses (as if in Google Docs). Rather than writing papers, they take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. Readings for the course are available online, but students old-school enough to want a paper copy can buy a seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page textbook that Nagy is about to publish, “The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.”