New Character Development Metric Added to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Annual U.S. College Rankings
“Good character powers responsible leadership,” says Dr. Edward Brooks, Executive Director of the Oxford Character Project (OCP), an interdisciplinary group of researchers based at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.
Since 2014, the OCP has been inspiring a new generation of leaders with programs designed to foster character strengths in postgraduate college students. It aims to help these emerging leaders “develop the moral and intellectual qualities to think with clarity, embrace diversity, navigate ambiguity, and persevere in the face of complex challenges.”
Brooks and his colleagues at the OCP believe “good leadership is central to the flourishing of organizations, society, and the natural world.” Equipping the next generation of leaders — i.e., college students — with practical approaches to develop the character needed to navigate the world's ever-growing complexity is a vital investment in our collective future.
The WSJ's Annual U.S. College Rankings have been a benchmark for colleges and universities since 2016. The influential report, built in collaboration with research partners College Pulse and Statista, assesses how well U.S. colleges and universities prepare students for financial success using data-driven metrics. The data is collected through surveys with students and alumni featuring “dozens of questions on topics covering student life, career preparation and the quality of classrooms, dining halls and sports facilities.”
This year, the addition of a ‘Character Score’ metric adds an important new dimension to the report.
“The development of character qualities that enable students to flourish personally and contribute to society is an essential aspect of college education.”
“The development of character qualities that enable students to flourish personally and contribute to society is an essential aspect of college education,” says Brooks. “The inclusion of character in the rankings is an important step that brings character development to the fore as an essential dimension of higher education in the 21st century.”
Designed to assess the extent to which institutions foster students’ development of character strengths, the ‘Character Score’ metric was the result of numerous collaborative discussions. . The concept and the questionnaire related to this measure were developed through conversations between Brooks and Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, Dr. Brendan Case, and Dr. Katelyn Long of The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Led by Harvard professor VanderWeele, The Human Flourishing Program “aims to encourage the measurement and tracking of various aspects of flourishing in workplace, medical, educational, and governmental settings, and to better understand the determinants of flourishing, and policies to promote it.” In 2017, VanderWeele and colleagues published a “Flourishing Measure,” based around five central domains, which include “character and virtue.”
Cultivating practices that bolster character and virtue is important for personal success, however, there’s a distinction between individual thriving and human flourishing that environment facilitates.
“While thriving often implies doing well, possibly despite difficulties, flourishing suggests a harmony with the environment or community that supports an individual’s wellbeing,” notes VanderWeele elsewhere. “For broader flourishing, which includes character development, we need embeddedness in communities, institutions, and long-term relational commitments.”
“The development of wisdom, justice, citizenship, and leadership is often embedded in the mission and vision statements of many institutions of higher learning, and it is time we start assessing this as well,” VanderWeele says.
The WSJ’s inclusion of character signals an important acknowledgement of the role of higher learning institutions in this concept.
“The development of wisdom, justice, citizenship, and leadership is often embedded in the mission and vision statements of many institutions of higher learning, and it is time we start assessing this as well.”
This year’s overall rankings from the WSJ were based on:
Character development is included under ‘Learning environment’ and makes up 4% of the overall ranking.
In all, about 60,000 survey responses from students and alumni at 500 universities and colleges over the last 9 months were recorded.
The ‘Character Score' section of the survey asked students to rate institutions' ability to foster the essential qualities that help them “make a meaningful contribution to society, including moral courage, resilience and fairness.” Students were asked about the extent to which college life has helped them to become more wise and more just, and whether their time at college has equipped them to change the world for the better. The survey also asked how hopeful students were about the future and how likely they are to “promote good” even in challenging circumstances. An important factor in the selection of these traits was their prominence in university advertising and messaging. For example, Princeton University, ranked overall number one in the nation, has focus on "commitment to service" and "leading lives of purpose,” and The Masters University, the institution with the highest score in character, has messaging based on “the deepest conviction and character.”
By emphasizing character development alongside academic achievement, reports like the WSJ Annual Rankings offer insights into how we can empower students and education systems to focus on holistic growth and prepare a new generation of leaders for success.
