Drake is winning

4/2/2025

 

Growing up in 1950s Des Moines, my family’s backdoor neighbor was an elderly German professor of Humanities at Grinnell College. Because our backyards were our baseball fields, we kids had several run-ins with the prof whenever we tried to retrieve foul balls from his fenced-in yard. 

“Get out of my yard. I will turn on the electric current in the fence,” was often yelled with an ominous German accent, a typical result of such encounters. My father, who taught at Drake and served in World War II, kept an eye on our games from his kitchen window. One time the Grinnell prof caught me and yelled he was taking me to the police station. 

Dad appeared quick as a mama bear with an endangered cub. Hot words were exchanged before I was released, but the neighborhood never forgot Dad’s final jibe: “I know all about you Humanists; you love humanity and you hate people.” 

My father never really got over his rivalry with the Grinnell prof. For decades, he bristled whenever Grinnell College came up in conversations as exemplary of excellence, which it often did. Grinnell’s reputation was universally accepted. In Iowa, it was as unimpeachable as Harvard’s. 

I was encouraged to apply to any college that interested me, with the singular exception of Grinnell. I could never think of anything else that might have offended Dad more. 

For decades, Grinnell was the consensus choice as the best college in Iowa public opinion. Dad might have been the only voice who debated that. US News & World Report monopolized college ratings for most of my lifetime and all of Dad’s. Grinnell always came out on top within Iowa, even rating higher than Iowa and Iowa State with all their esteemed graduate programs and professionalism. 

Dad was a dedicated champion of pragmatism. He particularly bristled about Drake versus Grinnell comparisons that he considered idealistic, in an impractical way. “Drake is OK for business majors, but Grinnell molds students into philosophers and artists,” for instance. 

Dad had been a philosophy major at Drake. He was the first head of Drake’s Department of Radio and Television, when it was the only such department in Iowa higher education. I would visit his studio/office, which was in what was then the Law School building. That building now houses Drake’s Graphic Design Department. Mock courtrooms have been transformed into meeting rooms. The former Radio and TV Department now houses state-of-the-art software and hardware labs. 

For the latter half of his 30-year career at Drake, Dad battled with deans and younger profs about how the discipline should be taught. Dad thought its focus should always be job and career preparation. Others favored theoretical courses, which he considered “useless to all but other teachers.” 

Dad lost his battles with the theorists as well as those with Grinnell. But every year now, I visit his grave and report to him on another year of changes. I believe that the time has come when I can tell him that Drake and pragmaticism are both finally winning. 

 

Changing times

In the years since COVID shutdowns, education — and particularly university educations — have been re-evaluated. The university experience, particularly at what used to be considered “elite” levels, is not considered as valuable as it used to be. Graduates and parents have begun wondering if an advanced degree in fields with limited jobs is worth the cost or the debt taken on. The prestige of an “elite” degree suddenly lacks quantifiable value. At some “elite” universities, protests and even riots directed against Israel have also diminished the value of “elite” educations. 

US News & World Report’s ratings have also been challenged, most significantly by Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The latter’s “WSJ/College Pulse 2025 Best Colleges in the U.S.” (WSJ ratings) assigns more value to things that can be quantified and less to more nebulous things like “prestige,” which, Dad taught me, is more important to theorists than to pragmatists. 

WSJ ratings have drastically altered perceptions about “elite” college educations. Babson College now ranks above all Ivy League schools but one; Claremont McKenna College above all but two; Davidson, which plays in Drake’s football league, above all but three; Harvey Mudd above all but four. That’s Mudd in the face of the elitists. 

Dad was also a sports fan with a strong emphasis on what he considered underdogs. As far as I could tell growing up, that mostly meant Drake, in all sports, and the Chicago Cubs in baseball. His name came up many times during Cubs’ radio and TV broadcasts, probably because those were produced by a favorite former Drake student of his — Arnie Harris. 

When the Cubs dispensed with a long century of futility in 2016 and actually won the World Series, I began visiting Dad’s grave to share a bottle of his favorite Irish or Dutch (never German) beer with the dirt above his bones. The WSJ ratings provided far more justification for his support of underdogs, in general, but Drake and pragmatism in particular.  

WSJ ratings’ beauty, certainly from Dad’s point of view, comes from its more pragmatic criteria. “Student outcomes” account for 70% of the scores. Twenty percent comes from “learning environment” and 10% from “diversity.”  

 

Mens sana

Before delving into how each of the criteria is accounted, I asked Drake President Marty Martin how Drake did. 

“Drake is now the top-rated college in Iowa, ahead of Iowa, Grinnell and Iowa State. Over the last 10 years, 98% of our graduates have found jobs within six months. What we are doing works. That’s why Wall Street Journal’s ratings like us.” 

The heavily weighted “student outcomes” score comes from three pragmatic, measurable criteria: “Salary impact” accounts for about half the score; “Graduation rate impact” and “years to pay off net price” account for about one fourth each. Salary impact measures “the extent to which a college boosts its graduates’ salaries beyond what they would be expected to earn regardless of which college they attended.”

Martin explained how Drake keeps track of such things. 

“We measure salary impact of our students 10 years out from the start of their undergraduate years at Drake. For each of nine years, we have been tops in Iowa. In the most recent year, our graduates were $11,000 a year ahead of Iowa and Grinnell grads.” He added that stat off the top of his head, sounding like the JAG lawyer he used to be. 

“In ‘lifetime return on investment,’ we always rank in the top 3-5% of all schools,” Martin added.

 

Training unicorns

What has Drake done that helped it break away from rival Iowa schools? 

“In 2018, we hosted a forum with a speaker from Bloomberg (business news empire). He told us that ‘What we need is unicorns who can collaborate when they get up from their computers.’ That reenforced our mission of integrating the liberal arts with business and the sciences.

“We take our membership in the Business and Higher Education Forum (BHEF) seriously,” Martin emphasized. 

BHEF is a national network that connects corporate and higher education leaders to “identify emerging skills and co-develop pathways that address talent needs.” The network seeks to “empower and catalyze collaborations that deliver accelerated, inclusive, and effective solutions,” according to its mission statement. 

“We see a future where higher education and business collaborate seamlessly to develop a skilled, adaptable workforce — one that drives innovation, fuels economic growth, and empowers individuals to thrive in meaningful careers,” Martin said.

 

AI and religion?

“We have identified cyber security and data analytics as skills to integrate in our business curricula. We initiated a degree program in Artificial Intelligence (AI). That includes our Religion and English departments, too. In service to humanity, we believe it’s important that technology not become an unqualified good by itself,” Martin explained. 

In four years, Drake’s AI degree program has quickly ramped up from 23 students to 73 taking it as a major or minor. A quarter of Drake undergraduates work toward degrees in computer science, math, data analytics, AI or actuarial science. 

Multiple times in the last two decades, one measurement or another has proclaimed a college degree in actuarial science as the most valuable in terms of starting salaries upon graduation. Drake’s Actuarial Science (AS) website adds that an AS degree ranks among the highest in the United States for job satisfaction and opportunities for advancement, as well as starting salary. 

Drake’s AS department has long been internationally renowned. (Drake grads in the class of 2023 are now working in 12 foreign countries and 40 different states.) Much of that is probably due to support from Bankers’ Life Insurance, now The Principal Financial Group. Drake students in the AS program have won internships with the Who’s Who of American insurance companies including Allstate, American Republic, Athene, CIGNA, Farm Bureau, GuideOne, Lincoln Financial Group, Nationwide, Northwestern Mutual, Mutual of Omaha, The Principal Financial Group, Travelers and Wellmark. I met one Drake grad in 1970s Las Vegas who took a job with a casino group and changed the way sports gambling set odds, by focusing more on predicting how gamblers would bet than just on which team might win. 

A strong actuarial science degree program typically includes coursework in mathematics (calculus, linear algebra), statistics, probability, finance, economics and computer science, along with actuarial science-specific courses. 

Dad called AS “higher math with which to play God,” meaning “predict the future.” The Principal Financial Group used to have a Department of Futurism, with an actuarial in charge. 

 

In corpore sano

Drake’s Athletics Department, directed by Brian Hardin since 2017, has done as much that would please Dad as academics under Martin. Dad was so involved in Drake sports that he announced their football and basketball games, wrestling meets and the Drake Relays. A basketball coach before I was born, his season tickets for that sport were chosen so that he sat as close to the referees as possible, in case they needed “influence-adjustments.”

When I was 10, Dad hung a bronze plaque in my bedroom that he had won as a Phi Beta Kappa. It read “mens sana in corpore sano.” That translates as “Sound mind in sound body,” but its message to me was that he expected excellence both in the classroom and on the playing fields. He frequently reminded me that the Duke of Wellington had said that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”  

Great news, Dad. Last year, Drake won the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC) All Sports Championship. That was an “against all odds” achievement. I have researched it as best I can on the internet and found only three other private schools that ever did it in a conference made up primarily of state-supported universities: Stanford, Southern Cal and Abilene Christian. And Southern Cal last did it in the 1950s. 

Martin corrected my research. 

“Tulsa won it in the Missouri Valley in 1960-61,” he said. 

Dad might argue that, when Tulsa did it, the conference was composed of mostly private universities, before Wichita went public and before Illinois State, Indiana State, Missouri State, Southern Illinois, Northern Iowa, Murray State and Illinois Chicago joined. 

Senior Associate Athletics Director Blake Boldon, who is also cross country and track director for both men’s and women’s programs, explained why that is so rare and difficult to do. 

“In cross country and in track and field, the conference championship is determined by placing athletes in the top three of multiple events. Illinois State can enter three times as many competitors as we can, in many events. That is the case in some other sports, too.” 

Drake won it by winning regular-season team titles in men’s cross country, women’s basketball, women’s soccer, plus tournament titles in women’s basketball and men’s basketball. Notably, Drake became the first institution in MVC history to win back-to-back tournament titles in both men’s and women’s basketball. In addition to the five team titles, Drake had top-five finishes in men’s basketball (regular-season), men’s golf, men’s outdoor track and field, men’s indoor track and field, women’s cross country, women’s golf, women’s tennis and volleyball. Last month, the Drake men’s team repeated as tourney champ and added the regular season title, too. 

“So, you understand what an achievement it was,” Martin told me after I mentioned Boldon’s explanation. 

Dad’s Drake chauvinism could get extreme. At the 50th reunion of Drake’s women’s basketball luncheon in December, Drake Hall of Famer and Iowa Head Basketball Coach Jan Jensen told the audience, “When I was in high school, Professor Duncan wrote me a letter explaining that a Drake education was every bit as valuable as a Harvard education. I guess it worked because I chose Drake over Harvard.” 

Academics are still recruiting players to Drake. Suzie Glazer Burt Head Basketball Coach Allison Pohlman told me in November that academics are one of her top recruitment tools. 

“Our players lean heavily to the health sciences. We have two pharmacy majors, several in pre-med sciences, one in dental science, several in business including health science administration. We have a journalism major and a sociology major. Drake really caters to helping you find and develop your personal interests.”

Martin added, “Katie (Dinnebier) and Courtney (Becker) are pharmacy grads. Anna (Miller) is going to be a doctor. The team has served 1,000 hours of community service this year, too.”

I asked Drake grad and longtime sports reporter Jane Burns what she thought has helped Drake teams excel. In an internet message, she said, “I think the athletic department did a better job making good hires. In the past decade or more, they’ve hired men’s coaches with much the same approach as they usually have with the women. They didn’t try to get some hot, young assistant, but instead found coaches who valued the Drake job in and of itself for various reasons, not just to get a crack at a D1 job, maybe a connection to Iowa or Drake in some way. 

“The fact that Drake keeps losing its coaches because they succeed is evidence of the very good hires that they’ve been making. It’s a bummer to lose them, but it’s way better than firing them.”

So, Dad, all I have to report this year is… “Winning.” ♦