Essential Estrogen

High school students still debating which college or university to attend in the fall have some new information at their fingertips. Unfortunately, the information, provided by an organization with conservative ties, doesn't shine a favorable light on most Iowa institutions of higher education.

Richard Vedder, director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) writing for Forbes, took a direct swipe at the popular college and university rankings produced by U.S. News & World Report, saying the "rankings ought to get a D."

While the U.S. News rankings didn't give Iowa institutions glowing marks, both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University ranked in the top 100. Iowa ranked 64th while Iowa State ranked 85th on the list of all national universities. On the list of national public universities, Iowa ranked 24 and Iowa State ranked 38. Both have significant slips backward in the rankings compiled by Vedder and CCAP.

"We start with the premise that consumers want two things when they buy a good or service," Vedder wrote in an announcement on the CCAP blog. "First, they want to be satisfied using the good -- it is easy to use, safe, etc. Second, they want it to do the job for which it is intended. We think ratings of colleges should reflect how colleges do in meeting those objectives. The US News rankings are more based on resources or inputs used or on institutional reputation. The two sets of rankings are moderately highly correlated with one another, but there are important differences."

The CCAP rankings utilized student perceptions gleaned from the ratemyprofessors.com Web site, alumni presences in "Who's Who in America," student success in national award competitions, and the probability of graduating from college in four years. In writing for Forbes, Vedder explains that he believes the rankings compiled by U.S. News are the "equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses" instead of rating the actual meal.

The CCAP rankings, however, did offer some praise for two of Iowa's liberal arts schools. Both Cornell College in Mount Vernon and Luther College in Decorah barely ranked in U.S. News' top 100. Cornell rose to CCAP's top 25, ranking 24th overall. Luther didn't rise quite as far, but moved up 10 slots to number 87 in the CCAP rankings.

Grinnell College, a private liberal arts school in Grinnell, fared much worse, dropping from 11 on the U.S. News rankings to 55th on the CCAP scorecard.

Ohio University, the school where Vedder is a professor of economics, rose on both the national university and national public university rankings.

The CCAP was founded by Vedder in 2006 with a $200,000 grant by the Searle Freedom Trust, founded by Daniel Searle. It wasn't the first time that the two teamed up. Searle was a large monetary contributor for Vedder's 2004 book, "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much," through a program at the American Enterprise Institute. It was Vedder's injection of personal conservative ideology in that book that has garnered him criticism as an enemy of higher education.

The attention to the book "got us thinking that there's really a lot more work to be done," Kimberly Dennis, executive director of the Searle Freedom Trust, told reporter Doug Lederman in May 2006. "No one’s looking into these issues, especially from the conservative side, and we wanted to support Rich’s interest in trying to figure out why higher education is so expensive, and what kind of policy mechanisms we could adopt that might make it more affordable.”

In addition to his work in relation to higher education, Vedder has partnered with Steve Moore, a former senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former president, chief executive officer and founder of Club for Growth, and Lowell Gallaway, another professor of economics at Ohio University and former chief of the Analytic Studies Section of the Social Security Administration, to produce a study about the impact of immigration on the American economy for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Gallaway and Vedder also worked to produce several studies for the U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Committee dealing with the "welfare state," economic opportunity, small business, entrepreneurs and labor.

Vedder was also a "peer reviewer" for a report for The Tobacco Institute that was published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Vedder has been a proponent of Wal-Mart as an economic stimulator and friend to the middle class. In addition, he has previously worked with Dwight Lee, another "peer reviewer" for the tobacco industry and a professor of economics at the University of Georgia, to write studies on government deficit reduction, tax cuts and monetary growth.