The Economist's US college rankings • Hacker News Board

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#51

Post by impendia » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:48 PM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #37

impendia wrote: post #9

I am a proud alumnus of Rice University and I see that it is on page 64, fifth from the bottom. Also, even more surprisingly, very near the bottom is Caltech. This is obviously wrong. If their methodology says that Caltech is in the bottom 2% of US colleges, then one concludes that their methodology is worthless, or at least that what it's predicting is not very closely related to the quality of the education provide…

It's important to distinguish that this system is not rating graduates, but institution performance. Sort the table by expected earnings, and Rice is on the front page. Students admitted to Rice are smart and successful people the moment they step into classes on day one. The question they're trying to answer is: once a smart and successful person chooses a college, how much value does that college add? Looking at th…

I definitely agree with you. I wasn't trying to explain how I think the article is flawed; rather, I was just trying to argue that its conclusions can be dismissed immediately.

In particular, I believe that your (3) describes what I see as the biggest flaw with their methodology; that (at least for elite colleges) what they are largely measuring the proportion of students that choose to go into high-paying professions.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#52

Post by 6stringmerc » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:49 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #47

6stringmerc wrote: post #6

The concept of studying in Higher Education for more opportunities, job stability, and income during one's lifetime is not to be dismissed. That said, if the predominant value of education is in the pursuit of money, then I think using the Brookings Institute model (which The Economist references) that includes two-year and vocational education entities is a much more pragmatic and practical approach. That is, if mon…

Interesting. According to Brookings, Amarillo College (2 year), West Texas A&M, and UT Austin rank roughly the same (mid 70s).

Yeah, and the UT San Antonio nursing school is gangbusters! That totally makes sense to me - cheap to attend / finance, extremely high earning potential in context.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#53

Post by impendia » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #14

impendia wrote: post #9

I am a proud alumnus of Rice University and I see that it is on page 64, fifth from the bottom. Also, even more surprisingly, very near the bottom is Caltech. This is obviously wrong. If their methodology says that Caltech is in the bottom 2% of US colleges, then one concludes that their methodology is worthless, or at least that what it's predicting is not very closely related to the quality of the education provide…

Rice is definitely on the way up - of any school that has a claim on being Harvard of the South they are the one that has made the most progress in terms of endowment and snagging promising researchers. As a Caltech grad, I'll give my two cents. They are afflicted with the worse version of the same problem MIT has - "working for Harvard men". Who besides Adam d'Angelo has made it really independently big in the tech…

Unfortunate to hear this about Caltech.

Nevertheless, as a graduate, I hope you regard it as self-evident that, even if your alma mater has slipped, it still deserves a place in the top 98%?

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#54

Post by cassieramen » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

brensudol wrote: post #10

cassieramen wrote: post #3

Does anyone know of a good diy college ranking system? One where you can pick that factors that actually matter to you. I'm always happy to see options other than U.S. News but I'd love to be able to tweak the algorithm myself. I think these one size fits all rankings are all flawed by their inherent nature.

I made a simple DIY ranking system using the same College Scorecard data last week. Here you go: http://bsudol.com/1PUPohk You can select which variables are important and how much, and it generates a top/bottom 50 list. This was inspired by this article from NPR ( http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/21/441417608/the-new-... )

This is awesome! I'm happy the college score card data is being used for great project like this.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#55

Post by btilly » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #50

btilly wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the predominant value of education is the pursuit of money, the Economist still has the more useful model. It allows you to differentiate between schools whose graduates make money because they are full of people who are going to try to make money, and schools that make money because the school brings something to the table that helps its graduates above other options. Look at CalTech for example. It does wel…

After reading through your response, I believe you missed my point. What I was referring to is that for a large population of potential students - those who wish to simply make more than if they do not go to a higher education program - going to a two year or vocational path school is exceptionally smart. Leaving that out of consideration is...not smart...highly biased...as in, how many readers of The Economist would…

Read the article again. The Economist controlled for a variety of factors. Family socioeconomic status was among them.

That said, one of the shortcomings of their metric is that they only had data on students who took out federal loans. How predictive this result is for others is open to question.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#56

Post by readymade » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

forgetsusername wrote: post #30

impendia wrote: post #9

I am a proud alumnus of Rice University and I see that it is on page 64, fifth from the bottom. Also, even more surprisingly, very near the bottom is Caltech. This is obviously wrong. If their methodology says that Caltech is in the bottom 2% of US colleges, then one concludes that their methodology is worthless, or at least that what it's predicting is not very closely related to the quality of the education provide…

> This is obviously wrong. "The analysis goes against my gut feeling, therefore it's wrong." Did you bother to read the article? The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere. That's what they did, and those were the…

Let's be completely honest, we're all somebody's rich friend on this site.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#57

Post by btilly » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

leroy_masochist wrote: post #17

So basically, the methodology is that they do a very complex analysis of the student body to predict what their average earnings would be if they went to "college in general" and then compare that with what the graduates actually make. There's one thing that jumps out at me when I see the actual rankings: At least three of the eight schools that received a perfect 100 score -- W&L, Babson, and Bentley -- have a very,…

Note that the data set they had only includes students who got federal loans. I strongly doubt that students who go to work for lucrative family businesses immediately upon graduation will be in the data set.

But having classmates who look like that seems to be a really good economic choice! Which is a factor that is not apparent in normal college rankings.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#58

Post by krstck » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

obastani wrote: post #49

This analysis doesn't make any sense to me. Even by their own intent (i.e., best added value based on salary), their methodology is nonsensical. For example: Why should CalTech get hurt for being near L.A.? They're basically arguing that you're better off going to a school in the middle of nowhere because "hey, for being in such a crappy location, you did pretty well!". In an absolute sense you are better off going t…

> They're basically arguing that you're better off going to a school in the middle of nowhere because "hey, for being in such a crappy location, you did pretty well!".

Well, no, not exactly. It's a subtle distinction, but what it's actually ranking is how well that school exceeds expectations, not best outcomes. This is not necessarily a list that will give a student the best school to go to, but rather (what it says on the tin) a scorecard for how well those schools are doing, given their resources.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#59

Post by vpalan2 » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

brensudol wrote: post #10

cassieramen wrote: post #3

Does anyone know of a good diy college ranking system? One where you can pick that factors that actually matter to you. I'm always happy to see options other than U.S. News but I'd love to be able to tweak the algorithm myself. I think these one size fits all rankings are all flawed by their inherent nature.

I made a simple DIY ranking system using the same College Scorecard data last week. Here you go: http://bsudol.com/1PUPohk You can select which variables are important and how much, and it generates a top/bottom 50 list. This was inspired by this article from NPR ( http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/21/441417608/the-new-... )

This is great. As a next step, perhaps make the sliders more mobile friendly?

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#60

Post by thefastlane » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

i tried to look up several four-year U.S. institutions just now, including one major research university, and none were in the list.

from the article, apparently they excluded universities when the scorecard dataset was missing one or more factors; it would be useful if the tool at least showed the university anyway as a placeholder and indicated what data was missing.