Since U.S. News & World Report led the way in 1983, several organizations have come up with ways of assessing the quality of colleges. Recently, the Heritage Foundation has gotten into this. Is its way any good?

In today’s Martin Center article, Samuel Negus argues that it is.

He writes:

In September, the Heritage Foundation launched an interactive, web-based guide to help students “Choose College with Confidence.” It currently grants nearly 300 colleges and universities one of three designations: “great option,” “worth considering,” or “not recommended.” I spoke with a contributor to the project, Heritage fellow Jonathan Butcher, who emphasized the difference between rating and ranking. Ordinal rankings, such as the influential U.S. News & World Report list, “emphasize selectivity,” Butcher said. They largely reflect “where students go, not what they do when they get there.”

As you’d expect, the usual suspects have attacked Heritage’s system. For instance, “Isaac Kamola of the Association of American University Professors and Trinity College, Connecticut, called Heritage ‘market fundamentalists’ and the rating system ‘ideologically driven.’”

That’s a pretty good indicator that Heritage is doing something right. (I have to add that the “market fundamentalist” sneer is utterly ignorant. Those who argue that government interference with the spontaneous order of the free market usually does more harm than good do so not because some text dictates their beliefs, but because they have read the work of centuries of great thinkers.)

The Heritage project is just getting going, but it appears to offer students and their families a valuable way of figuring out if a college does or does not align with their values.