With college-application season approaching, where should the college bound and their families look for guidance?
According to professor and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, not in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual college guide (just out), even though his own employer, UC Berkeley, once again was ranked the nation’s top public university (No. 20 overall, after a long list of private institutions).
“Without fail,” he writes on his blog, the “Best Colleges” listing gives highest marks to “America’s most exclusive and expensive private universities” — ones that educate “small percentages of students from poor families … and train a disproportionately large share of the nation’s investment bankers, corporate chieftains, corporate lawyers, and management consultants.”
Lower rankings consistently go to public universities, which admit most of the low-income students who attend college and which graduate “far larger percentages of teachers, social workers, legal aide attorneys, community organizers and public servants than do the private elite colleges,” he notes, adding:
“My Berkeley students are every bit as bright as the students I met or taught in the Ivies.”
Read Robert Reich’s opinion piece here.