A look at giving back: Service and accountability at Princeton

In the U.S. News ranking war to which Princeton is only officially indifferent, we nearly always top the list. Every year when the magazine publishes its college rankings issue, Princeton puts out a press release downplaying the value of the honor. This is a yearly ritual, as regular as the P-rade. Its disruption would cause major psychological dislocation for the administration and trustees.

In August the Washington Monthly published its own rankings measuring how much colleges and universities contributed to the national good. The rankings put Princeton at #44, behind such institutions as Iowa State and South Carolina State. Though the University does not officially give much credence to such rankings, the resulting response — in the form of an elegant and restrained letter to the Washington Post penned by University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee '69 — belied a very real sense of concern behind the scenes.

The truth is, the Washington Monthly rankings employed a methodology that could best be described as shamefully crude. The criteria used to measure "what colleges are doing for the nation" included such outdated indicators as participation in the Peace Corps by graduates and percentage of students receiving federal Pell grants (to measure the number of low income students in attendance at a given university). In an assessment in which hundreds of different variables — including availability of funding for summer service internships, depth and quality of community-based research programs, and participation by students in volunteer community service programs (the Washington Monthly, by the way, attempts to measure none of these examples) — could potentially come into play, the limitations of the ranking criteria almost totally undercut the validity of the exercise.

Princeton's poor showing in the rankings is due at least in part to the fact that, as Durkee said in his letter to the Post, the rankings "measure only what they measure," and fail to recognize that, for instance, eight percent of the Class of 2005 applied to Teach for America following graduation, or that Princeton's financial aid program for students from low income families is actually among the most robust in the nation. Princeton struck out according to the Washington Monthly's criteria, but it might have just as easily hit a grand slam had a different set of equally arbitrary criteria been used.

There is real value, however, in the larger question raised by the Washington Monthly: How are we measuring what we do for the country? We are committed to public service even in our unofficial motto, but do we have a precise sense of the breadth and depth of that commitment?

Right now, Princeton's institutional monitoring of its contribution to the national good and commitment to public service is overwhelmingly anecdotal. Princeton's PR machine is fond of and adept at collecting vignettes about Princetonians who serve, but these don't really help us understand the totality of our contributions to our community and the nation and how we could do better.

None of this is to say that there aren't real and sustained efforts to enable interested Princetonians to participate in public service activities at Princeton and in analogous careers after graduation. Princeton-in-Africa, the SVC, Project 55 and other outlets for public service seem, with strong support from the University, to be thriving. Undoubtedly, though, there are ways in which, as Pace Center director Kiki Jamieson wrote to me, "we might work together to do more and better." In the absence of a comprehensive metric for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our current orientation toward public service, these ways will be hard to find.

The Washington Monthly got the story wrong, but they were right to try to hold universities like Princeton accountable for the value of their public service. Herein lies an opportunity for Princeton to do a real service for the nation: We should, in a rigorous and academic way, devise comprehensive success measures with which colleges and universities can assess the value they add not just for their own students, but to the nation and world. To lead the effort to create such an assessment tool is a way in which we can wholeheartedly live up to Woodrow Wilson's exhortation that Princeton function in the nation's service. Thomas Bohnett is a Wilson School major from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.