America's WORST Colleges by Washington Monthly

America’s Worst Colleges by Ben Miller | The Washington Monthly

 

Half are non-profits???

Wow, in that list half of the crappiest schools in the U.S. are "non-profit" and the other half are for-profit. So the crap list is about 50/50? How can non-profits be equally as bad as for-profits?

http://wamo.s3.amazonaws.com/mag/1409/1409-Miller1_article.jpg

 

non-profit bad colleges

Many of the non-profit "bad colleges" are HBCU (Historically Black Colleges/ Universities). These days, well-qualified Black students can go to college anywhere and a declining proportion choose HBCU. Most of these schools have had to lower their admissions standards to where students with little chance of graduating are admitted. Consequently, a very high proportion of their former students default on their loans.

Of course this is exactly what makes so many "for profit" colleges "bad". They admit anyone, encourage them to take out massive loans. Then the students never graduate or pass their state exam, leading to default.

Full disclosure: I attended a HBCU, Lincoln University (PA)

 

"Private" is 100%

 

There is a disproportionately high number of for-profit schools on the list.

 

Worst Colleges

Note that there are 2 or 3 pages to this article (depending on your browser) in which the WORST COLLEGES are determined three different ways.

 

Interesting that ITT Tech, Everest . . . .etc are not on any of the lists.

I thought that they were high ranking offenders in these categories; according to the government.

 

ITT Tech is on Ranking #4 on page 2.

 

I'd like to say something about Becker College. It's just about in my backyard and so you can't help but know a few things about it. Overall my impression is that it's a very nice school. It's small in comparison to some others in the general area (UMass, UConn, etc.) and I think that many of the students are local kids,not too many coming from across the country. This might begin to change though because it has received recent recognition for it's programs in Nursing, Animal Science, and Video Game Creation. Also, it has been favorably reviewed in the Princeton Review (Top 400 schools). It might be pricey, I don't know because I didn't check. It's not a big research university and I think that's OK because it's not trying to be a big research university. It doesn't compare well to some other colleges in the area (like Harvard, MIT, Brown, Yale, etc.) but then most other schools fail that test as well. Personally I think that this is a great example of why I don't pay much attention to college rankings/ratings. As far as I know, Becker is a perfectly good small college and certainly not "one of the worst" schools in the country.

Yesterday & Today - Becker College

 

The Big Dog in American college rankings is US News & World Report. One of the reasons that their rankings get so much attention is that they publish the underlying data that are used to generate them. You may not agree with the way that US News ranks a particular school, but at least you can look at the numbers, compare them to those of peer institutions, and see how the ranking was generated.

We can't do that with the Washington Monthly story. They show four different ways to rank the "Worst Colleges", but they don't show the underlying numbers for any of the schools in any of the rankings. So it's hard to see if these particular rankings really make sense.

For Becker College, the implications are that it is expensive, has a low graduation rate, its students take on a lot of debt, and tend to default on it. But since the numbers aren't provided, we can't see if it really is out of line compared to other institutions.

One factor that is completely ignored here is school size. There are questionable non-profit schools, but they tend to be small, struggling institutions, with little or no endowment and low enrollments, maybe one or two thousand students. In contrast, the concerns about questionable for-profit schools extend to very large institutions, with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of students. Even if the graduation rates or debt loads or default rates at two such schools are identical, it's obvious that far more people and money will be involved at the for-profit, simply because the for-profit is large and the non-profit is small.