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.
The measurement error in this case is more well-meaning than in many others, but it’s still an error. And I’m still unconvinced that it adequately captures the value of students who transfer, whether with a degree or just with a bunch of classes.
Presumably, those objections could be incorporated into a more refined effort. But even the objections implicitly concede that the only relevant scale on which to measure education is income. Postcollege income matters, of course, but it’s not the only thing that matters. If it were, we would stop training early-childhood teachers and social workers immediately.
Part of the attraction of measuring income is that it’s quantifiable. Even I sometimes get twitchy when academics refer to the “ineffable” benefits of something; it can be hard to disentangle idealism from wishful thinking. But some noneconomic benefits of higher education are relatively easy to quantify in the short term.
What if we measured colleges on the voting rates of new graduates?
Voting is quantifiable, at least for now. It’s a basic form of adult civic engagement. It doesn’t rely on economic cycles that can wreak havoc with starting salaries. And we know from decades of political science that on average, people who vote are more knowledgeable about politics and social issues than people who don’t. (Contrary to popular myth, people who consistently vote a party line are more informed on average than ticket-splitters, but that’s another article.)
Voting rates also wouldn’t be distorted by the low earnings of students who transferred and are in their junior or senior years of college when surveyed. Yes, voting rates are higher in presidential years, but presidential years happen at the same time for every college in the country, so they wouldn’t affect comparisons between institutions.
If we took postgraduation voting rates seriously, colleges would be incentivized to improve the civic literacy and involvement of their students. That strikes me as an excellent outcome. That’s especially true for community colleges, given that their student bodies are much more representative of America than the elite selective universities.
Community colleges train, yes, but they also educate. Why not educate for democracy? And why not support—with funding and publicity—the colleges that do a particularly good job of that?
