The release of America's Colleges 2027 by U.S. News & World Report on Tuesday is easily the story of the week as the guide placed CSU in its "National Universities" category for the first time ever. Brad Raizner, the founder of Portal, has taken a deep dive into this year's ranking results and has come away so far with six huge takeaways. First, within the top 200 institutions, private universities were twice as likely to rise in the rankings as public universities. Second, among the top 200 institutions, the average rising private university rose nearly twice as many spots as the average rising public university. Third, the rankings formula removed the graduate debt criterion, which constituted 5%, and replaced it with an earnings by major criterion. As Raizner concludes, this reduces the incentive for universities to graduate their students with less debt. This change will not likely benefit CSU as it likely performed relatively better on the graduate debt metric than it will on the earnings by major metric. Fourth, the new earnings by major metric only compares graduates who received federal financial aid. This doesn't fully exclude high-income students, but it tilts the incentive toward helping those from low- and middle-income backgrounds earn more after college. Fifth, Catholic universities cleaned up. Within the top 200 institutions, 16 of the 20 Catholic universities rose in the rankings. Sixth, the earnings data used for this year's rankings covers students who finished in 2017-18 and 2018-19, measured in 2022 and 2023. Therefore, whatever a school does now to impact earnings may not show up in the rankings until 2033. Mid-to-high-tier private professional universities are up, large public flagships are down. Keeping student debt low isn’t helping rankings anymore. Now it pays extra to increase graduates' paychecks. Universities now have yet another incentive to invest in students' career outcomes. For career services teams, that strengthens the case for more funding and getting buy-in for embedding career preparation into the curriculum.
A Turner College student recently contacted Turner Business to provide the image shown at right. It shows that a piece of the brand new reconstruction of the Synovus Center envelope, which was done by Sheridan Construction at a cost of about $10 million, is dangling above an exit door on the second floor of the building, thereby posing a safety hazard. A zoom in on the masonry work above the dangling metal sheet in the photograph also shows a good bit of unevenness. This same type of unevenness can be seen in person as one approaches the front of the building. The same student also added that the new renovations to the Davidson Center, which cost $4.8 million, are "underwhelming." This, along with the re-envelope project and the Turner College's construction of the Hamilton synchronous distance learning classroom, which was never put into operation as the company that designed and equipped the room filed for bankruptcy and can no longer support the proprietary software needed to operate the facility, is establishing a trend that CSU needs to reverse in order to provide the kind of campus life necessary to address the ongoing enrollment crisis.
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