The Grading Game: Should Colleges Teach Good Citizenship – and Does the Public Want Them To?

America's magazine editors continue to come up with new ways of rating colleges, with the U.S News and World Report ranking coming out as Washington Monthly unveils a new standard aimed at assessing an institution’s contribution to the "public good." But what does the public think a college education is all about?

The U.S. News and World Report rankings, of course, have been a controversial touchstone for college applicants for years, so sought-after that college administrators have been accused of gaming the system. Washington Monthly's new ratings use a much different set of standards, based on how colleges promote social mobility, research, and service.

These kinds of rankings persist because they fill a need. With students having to pile on debt to go to college – new federal stats show student borrowing increased by 25 percent last year -- parents and students need some kind of guidance. People who are making a major investment in their lives should have at least as much information as they do when buying a dishwasher.

Public Agenda's research shows more and more Americans consider higher education essential. But when they say that, what are they expecting students to get out of the experience?

In our Squeeze Play 2007 survey, we asked the public a battery of questions on "what students should gain out of college." The top response was "a sense of maturity and ability to manage on their own" (68 percent said this was "absolutely essential"), followed by the skills they need to get a job (60 percent), an ability to get along with people different than themselves (59 percent), learning high-tech skills (57 percent) and thinking analytically (56 percent).

Many of these "essential" qualities are "soft skills," things that make a student a responsible and respectable person, rather than just a good scholar or a good employee. But they're not automatically skills for the greater social good. The "responsibilities of citizenship, such as voting and volunteering" was much further down the list, at 39 percent. This doesn't mean that good citizenship doesn't matter at all to the public, in fact, it's quite the opposite. It's just that they don't see it as essential for higher education.

And most Americans (two-thirds) surveyed in Squeeze Play do believe higher education is teaching students what they need to know.

But it's also true that attitudes about higher education have become more skeptical, mostly driven by frustration with rising costs. In Squeeze Play 2009, we found 55 percent who said colleges are more focused on the bottom line than on their educational mission – operating more like businesses -- and more than half said colleges could spend less and still provide the same quality.

That skepticism may be the real measure worth watching, rather than magazine rankings. If rising numbers of the public think college is essential, but doubt whether they're getting their money's worth, eventually they're going to start insisting that college administrators address those concerns.