College ratings to trust
If you are, as the law school applicant in my family has begun to call them, a prestige whore, then I guess the U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges rankings are for you. Those lists are based heavily on what colleges think of each other---what is called the reputational score. The higher the rank, the wider the smile on your grandmother's face when you get in.
But if you want an introduction to a lesser known, but to my mind more useful, rating of undergraduate institutions, take a close look at my colleague Daniel de Vise's examination of the National Survey of Student Engagement, part of washingtonpost.com's new higher education page.
The NSSE, or "Nessie" to its friends, tells you not how much esteem the masses hold for a college, but how much value it has added to its students' lives. It does not ask college presidents at other schools to rate the campus. It asks students who actually studied there. The questions are based on the most extensive research of what makes a valuable college experience: How many short papers did you write? How often did you talk to professors out of class about what you were learning? How much contact did you have with students of different backgrounds?
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Fairfax doublespeak on school openings and MoCo’s gamble
The adults who work in Fairfax County government are allowed to take unscheduled leave today because, presumably, the streets are not plowed well enough for business as usual. Yet kids (and adults) are supposed to get to Fairfax County public schools. How nice: They get two extra hours to get there.
Something is wrong with this picture.
If the roads aren’t clear enough to order all county government employees to go to work, (as emergency service personnel were told to do), how can county officials be confident that the roads are clear enough for school buses to pick up tens of thousands of students?
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