We all know that media rankings of universities and colleges have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, from the public and from prospective students. It’s almost become an escalating arms race between colleges who want to increase their standings and status in such rankings. But as the New York Times reports, when public universities try to increase their rankings and prestige, they risk jeopardizing their fundamental goal of educating the average student:

To upgrade the [Univ. of Florida], Dr. Machen is seeking a $1,000 tuition surcharge that would be used mostly to hire more professors and lower the student-faculty ratio, not coincidentally one of the factors in the much-watched college rankings published annually by U.S. News & World Report. This year, that list ranked Florida 13th among public universities in the United States.

Like Florida, more leading public universities are striving for national status and drawing increasingly impressive and increasingly affluent students, sometimes using financial aid to lure them. In the process, critics say, many are losing force as engines of social mobility, shortchanging low-income and minority students, who are seriously underrepresented on their campuses.

“Public universities were created to make excellence available to all qualified students,” said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an advocacy group, “but that commitment appears to have diminished over time, as they choose to use their resources to try to push up their rankings. It’s all about reputation, selectivity and ranking, instead of about the mission of finding and educating future leaders from their state.” . . .

The demands on such universities are growing, too, particularly with many states questioning their spending on higher education. Increasingly, these colleges are expected to bolster their states’ economies by attracting research grants and jobs. To do that, they say, they must compete with elite private universities.

So the universities face a tough balancing act: should they push for higher status and higher tuition revenue by accepting more top-achieving, out-of-state students, or should they worry about broadening access for low-income, in-state students? Is their primary goal to serve the people of their state or to compete nationally with private research universities? Can they leave the less prestigious state colleges to serve the bulk of in-state students?

Certainly this is a complicated issue and there are no easy answers. Ultimately, I would have to say that as the U.S.’s economy continues to stress “postindustrial” skills such as expertise with information management and technology, having a college degree becomes a critical foundation for socioeconomic success. In other words, getting a college degree is more important than ever.

With that in mind however, as public universities begin to price themselves out of reach to poor, working class, and even many middle class students, they risk creating an undereducated underclass that will become stuck where they are because they can’t afford to get a college degree, as opposed to that they’re not smart or qualified enough to do so. Therefore, social class inequality will continue to get worse unless we make college more affordable.

How about giving students more financial aid you say? Saddling students with even more debt is not the answer. Instead, if public schools want to raise tuition and attract more affluent students, that’s fine, but at the same time, they also need to follow the lead of private schools by also giving out more free-ride scholarships or significant tuition breaks to less affluent students, something being proposed in the University of Texas system.

Use the rich to help the needy. That’s a lesson all of American society needs to learn.