We ran a story by Hillsdale College student Vivian Hughbanks last week about the White House’s new “college scorecard,” and how it leaves out colleges that don’t take federal money, including the conservative Hillsdale and Grove City College.
A senior PR official in the Department of Education claimed Hillsdale specifically was left off the ranking system, which aims to measure “bang for your buck,” because it doesn’t offer enough two-year and four-year degrees: It’s a “predominantly certificate degree granting institution.”
Hillsdale’s provost just called bullshit on the department, in The Wall Street Journal.
David Whalen writes that Hillsdale was founded by abolitionists, and was the first U.S. college “to prohibit by charter discrimination based on race or sex,” long before the Department of Education was even a glint in the eye of Jimmy Carter.
He has no clue why the feds are lying about Hillsdale’s academic program:
This is utterly false. Hillsdale College issues four-year undergraduate degrees in 31 disciplines as well as postgraduate degrees; it doesn’t offer any certificates for academic credit.
The problem with the Department of Education is it thinks the only colleges that matter are “financial dependents” of the feds and those which reduce their student population to their skin color, Whalen says:
The college has attempted to report other data—financial information and retention rates, for example—but the Education Department won’t accept submissions that don’t include race-based tallies. … Other college ranking systems—U.S. News & World Report, the Princeton Review, among others—are happy to accept the trove of other data that Hillsdale records.
Other schools get to leave off certain data points in the scorecard without being wholly excluded, he says.
If it’s not simply because Hillsdale stands on its own two feet, without a federal handcuffout, then perhaps the Obama administration
wants to avoid informing parents and high-school students about a college that is known for its conservative outlook and its emphasis on a classical liberal-arts education.
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