Researching and choosing a North Carolina college can prove to be a daunting task for even the most diligent parent and student. But a new website aims to make the process easier and more complete, giving people the good and not-so-good news about North Carolina colleges and universities. Jenna Ashley Robinson, outreach coordinator for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, discussed the new site with Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Martinez: So what was it you thought was lacking in the current resources available to parents and students about all the colleges in North Carolina?
Robinson: We thought a couple things were really lacking. The first one is that most of the existing resources are really rankings, rather than a simple list of information. And, at the Pope Center, we think that there is no No. 1 college because students have different needs, different wants. There’s a No. 1 college for you or for your child, but it’s really — we think it should be a do-it-yourself system.
Some students might want things that are very different from what other students want. So we think something like U.S. News, where you just get one through 50, it’s not one through 50 for every student. It’s too generic. It’s too broad. And we also thought that for, say, homeschool parents or conservative Christian parents, or maybe the parents are charter school parents, they would want to know a little bit more about the campus culture, both intellectually and politically, and we thought that those particular categories have been neglected in some of the other rankings and rating systems.
Martinez: There are a lot of colleges and universities in North Carolina. I was very surprised. Tell us about that.
Robinson: There are actually 54 four-year accredited schools in North Carolina. This doesn’t include the community college system or the for-profit schools. So these are the kind of typical four-year universities that you think about. There are 54 in North Carolina, and we’ve covered all of them. Some of them have every piece of data available. Some of them don’t provide as much data as others, but we’ve covered all of those 54 schools.
Martinez: So you created a website. Tell us where people can find the website and what they can find out on the site.
Robinson: It’s www.nccollegefinder.org. And we’ve divided the data into three categories. The first category is just basic data that you would find on any rankings or ratings website — tuition, location, size of the college, whether it’s affiliated with a religious institution, whether it’s a women’s school or an HBCU [historically black college or university.
The second category is what we call academic quality, and in that one we’ve got a couple of things. One is from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and they’ve provided a grade on schools’ general education requirements — the core curriculum — so you get from an A to an F on whether the schools require things like political science, economics, literature, foreign language, math, and hard sciences. We also have a rating of academic transparency, and that’s whether the schools put up on their website or make public how well students do on some standardized assessments of both student involvement and student academic achievement.
We also have one of our own, which is whether students are required, if they are majoring in English, to take a course in Shakespeare, which we think is interesting for two reasons. We think whether you have to take a course in Shakespeare is a good measurement of academic rigor, but it’s also a good measurement of how traditional the curriculum is.
Martinez: I think some parents might just assume that, “Of course, if my child is going to college, they’re going to be reading Shakespeare.” But that’s not the case.
Robinson: Absolutely not. And it’s to the point that even if you major in English, you still might not be reading Shakespeare. So we think that’s rather telling. And then the third category we have is a political category, so you can find out things like the political balance of faculty members, the political balance of trustees, how political the campus is overall. Some campuses don’t have any political groups, and some campuses have 20-plus political groups. You can also find out whether there is an alternative newspaper on campus and the extent to which free speech is allowed or restricted on campus, and that data is from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Martinez: And that’s a particularly interesting category, I think, Jenna, because when we’ve talked to you previously here on Carolina Journal Radio, we’ve talked about some of the campuses and some of the speech codes that they have either actually enforced on campus or have tried to, and then have been called on it. So parents might be a little bit surprised about some of the grades that campuses are receiving.
Robinson: I think they will. The most surprising thing is, still North Carolina doesn’t have any green lights for free speech. But also there are plenty of red lights throughout the state where free speech is severely restricted, and quite a few yellow lights where speech is somewhat restricted in certain areas. You expect colleges to be free-flowing places of ideas — a marketplace of ideas — where you have to defend your ideas rather than just having them be banned. But that’s unfortunately not the case.
Martinez: Now there’s also some information that, as I was looking through, I thought, this is the first thing I would look at. That has to do with graduation rates and the starting salaries of their graduates. So how did you find that out?
Robinson: We basically looked at two different sources for that. Graduation rates are, of course, available from either federal statistics or on individual campus websites. For the starting salaries, we looked at a website called Pay Scale. It’s a fairly new website, and it is user-generated data, so recent graduates go to the website looking for information about their field, and individuals will input their salaries. So the longer the website exists, the better their data gets. But we have data on how much students start making within the first four years of employment after graduating. And we think that although it’s a little bit high across the board possibly, it’s very comparable.
So you can see that if you go to Duke University, for example, you’re going to make somewhat more than if you go to [a public] school. But conversely, you might have more debt if you go to a university where you end up making more money. So we also measure the debt-to-salary ratio, recommending those schools where you get substantially more in salary than you’ll end up owing.
Martinez: Interesting. Is there any data about financial aid that’s available to institutions on this site, or is that completely outside of the purview?
Robinson: That’s something that we haven’t included, but we always are looking for more measures to include in the future. Financial aid might be something that we look at, but it is kind of implicit in how much debt someone graduates with. For example, if you see a school where the tuition is $20,000 a year, but they only graduate with $4,000 of debt, then in many cases it’s because that school makes a lot of financial aid available in the form of scholarships to those students.
Martinez: I also noticed that you had a category about alumni and their participation in terms of donating back to the school that they attended. How did you gather that information, and why did you think it was important?
Robinson: We think that information is important because the number of alumni who are giving back to their universities is a gauge of how involved those alumni are and how happy they are with what’s been going on at their university and their own university experience. We found, for example, that at Wingate, the alumni giving percentage is very, very high, and we think that reflects well on the school, showing that the alums are very proud and very pleased with the education that they got there.
Martinez: So it sounds like just a wealth of information — the good stuff that the universities want you to know, and maybe some other information that might not be so readily available. Give us the website again.
Robinson: It’s www.nccollegefinder.org.