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Tag: Colorado College

Colorado College’s Bold Move: Breaking Free from U.S. News College Rankings

In February, Colorado College announced it would no longer cooperate with U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of best colleges. The private Colorado Springs school, ranked 27th nationally among liberal arts colleges, said the list “privileges criteria that are antithetical to our values and our aspirational goals.”

Colorado College called the ranking methodology flawed, and pointed to three main shortcomings: a questionnaire that asks institutions to rank each other’s reputation subjectively, a reliance on high school grades and standardized test scores that result in schools offering merit aid instead of need-based aid, and a metric related to student debt that creates incentives for schools to admit wealthy students.  

READ: Guest Column — Closing the Racial Wealth Gap With Education and Financial Planning

Leadership at Colorado College says feedback on the decision has been good. “We surveyed our staff, faculty, students, parents and alumni, and we had an overwhelmingly positive response,” says L. Song Richardson, president of Colorado College. “We aren’t afraid to take bold and courageous action to support our vision.” Colorado College does not actively participate in other publications’ rankings, and those organizations often use data that the school provides to the U.S. Department of Education.  

Other schools such as Columbia University, Bard College, Stillman College and the Rhode Island School of Design have also stopped participating in the rankings. Richardson adds that Colorado College will pay attention to its future ranking. “If we drop precipitously, this should engender further questions about the legitimacy of the rankings because a precipitous drop would not make sense simply because we decided not to submit data to U.S. News.” 

There are other lists. The Princeton Review published The Best 388 Colleges 2023. Forbes has its America’s Top Colleges List. There are other online lists based on various surveys. While imperfect, the rankings do serve a purpose. “Many of the metrics actually are good metrics,” says Corinne Lengsfeld, senior vice provost of research and graduate education at the University of Denver. “It’s a nice feedback loop that you are making improvements that really count.” The information helps DU leadership reflect upon the programs it put in place and areas where it improved.  

For prospective students and their families, graduation rates and retention rates are the most important metrics to consider. “You don’t go to a university with the intent to drop out,” Lengsfeld says. “You go with the intent to graduate.”  

One metric that can use improvement is employment outcomes, because Fortune 500 companies tend to skew those results by hiring large numbers of graduates every year. “The smaller businesses that get one or two graduates, their voices won’t be heard,” Lengsfeld says. 

People should consider rankings as part of a larger set of data. “It’s one source of information,” says Lori Kester, associate provost of enrollment management for Colorado School of Mines. “I don’t know that I would say it should be the primary source.” The best way to predict a good fit, she says, is to visit the campus.  

READ: Is it Possible to Get an Education Without Debt?

For employers, the rankings are less important than graduates’ preparedness. Kester says Mines has a good reputation among employers because graduates show up for their jobs ready to do the job they are hired for.  

One benefit of the rankings is they help Mines communicate the important work the school is doing. “We are a public institution, so we don’t have this gigantic recruitment staff,” Kester says.  

That awareness helps other schools too. “People value certain rankings because we’re all trying to find ways of standing out amongst a very crowded field,” says Chris Beiswanger, director of admissions at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. “There is not one tried-and-true source of who’s the best.”  

The rankings serve as a shorthand. “I think students, parents, outsiders, businesses, we all like the cleanliness of, ‘You went to the number one place, you must be good,’” Beiswanger says. He adds that that’s especially true for international students who want the reassurance that rankings provide.

For employers, accreditation and experiences should matter more than rankings. “If you look at successful people,” Beiswanger says, “you find they didn’t all go to top schools in the country.”  

 

Nora Caley is a freelance writer specializing in business and food topics.

Colorado College’s carbon neutrality is a first for the region

The leadership at Colorado College took a leap of faith to commit to a goal that took 11 years of hard work to accomplish.

In January, the private liberal arts college in Colorado Springs became the first higher education institution in the Rocky Mountain region to achieve carbon neutrality in its operations. The campus has reached zero net emissions in greenhouse gases in all operations for which they own or control, says Ian Johnson, Colorado College sustainability director.

“We went out on a limb and made an audacious stretch goal in 2009,” Johnson says. “It became part of our strategic plan and became a common understanding that we were all working for.”

Only nine North American colleges have reached carbon neutral status so far, according to Steve Muzzy, climate programs senior manager at Second Nature, a Boston-based nonprofit tracking those efforts. Larger Colorado institutions including University of Denver, Western Colorado University, Colorado State University and Colorado Mountain College are progressing toward carbon neutrality by 2050.

The carbon neutral pledge at the 100-acre Colorado College campus with an enrollment of 2,200 undergraduates required the work of students, faculty, staff and community partners. The college slashed overall on-campus emissions by 75% compared with the 2008 baseline, Johnson says. Efforts included energy efficiency retrofits in buildings, a 14-week campus behavioral change program and a large geothermal energy installation during a library renovation. Solar power installations play a large role with arrays on campus building rooftops, on the ground at a school facility near Crestone, and panels purchased in solar gardens through Colorado Springs Utilities.

The college purchased some verified carbon offsets for a methane capture project at a landfill in Colorado, yet Johnson says it is important for organizations to tackle the “hard work of reducing emissions as much as possible through conservation and efficiency first and to continue working to reduce those emissions even after looking to off-site investments.”

Johnson says energy efficiency improvements make good business sense: $1.5 million spent on campus sustainability projects during the past 10 years resulted in $6.6 million in avoided utility costs. The campus projects are scalable and replicable for other institutions to follow.

“We see that as part of our responsibility to be that model and educate others about this,” Johnson says. “The world in large part looks to higher ed institutions to provide answers to some of these tricky problems.”