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The Economist's US college rankings

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Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#61

Post by cgearhart »

>"The government generated the numbers by matching individuals’ student-loan applications to their subsequent tax returns, making it possible to compare pupils’ qualifications and demographic characteristics when they entered college with their salaries ten years later."

So the dataset excludes students who do not apply for loans? (i.e., this analysis penalizes schools who admit the folks most likely to make lots of money, and the schools that have the lowest expected student contribution.)

>"...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."

If we are only to look at financial incentives, a more reasonable analysis would be to compare the expected future earnings _distribution_ as opposed to just a central tendency statistic like the median.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#62

Post by nilkn »

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…

I wonder how Rice's presence in Houston affected their expected earnings for Rice students. I could easily see Houston really throwing off their calculations if they weren't very careful. Houston's the fourth largest city in the US, but isn't anywhere near as expensive as its peer cities. Similarly, outside of a few select industries, Houston salaries are lower than salaries in similar cities as well.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#64

Post by selimthegrim »

impendia wrote: post #53
selimthegrim wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%?

I highly doubt the kind of people who would flourish at Caltech care what the Economist thinks. Which is a pity in some sense, because they should care about what the stereotypical Economist reader thinks.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#65

Post by obastani »

krstck wrote: post #58
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 sa…

That's my point -- who decides what expectations are? Their results are incredibly dependent on the model specification. I imagine if they changed which indicators they used, the results would vary widely.

Here's another way to see my concern. Suppose you had a classifier that achieves 1.0 R^2; then since it perfectly predicts each school's expected value, it'll assign each school a score of 0. I'm pretty suspicious of an approach where the results get worse with better predictive power.

Even if you want to do "exceeds expectations", I think you shouldn't include variables that are school specific, only variables that are student specific. In other words, for my expected outcomes, which school is best?

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#67

Post by nilkn »

If I were a prospective student interested in making a lot of money out of college, surely I'd still just follow this very simple model:

Take all the schools I could get into, look up their actual median earnings, and go to the one which is highest (let's ignore issues of cost of attendance).

If it turns out that the one which is highest isn't ranked high on this particular list, I don't see why that would suggest I still shouldn't pick that school. Imagine these are my options, for instance:

(A) A school with expected earnings of $90k and actual earnings of $75k.

(B) A school with expected earnings of $50k and actual earnings of $55k.

(B) will rank vastly higher than (A) in this study, but I'd pick (A) over (B) every time if I just wanted money.

In short, I don't actually see the value add here from this list. How am I supposed to act on these rankings? How are these rankings supposed to change any idea I might have about which school I should attend?

It seems if you want to know which school to attend based on earnings we already have much more reliable data for that: actual earnings data.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

cgearhart wrote: post #61

> "The government generated the numbers by matching individuals’ student-loan applications to their subsequent tax returns, making it possible to compare pupils’ qualifications and demographic characteristics when they entered college with their salaries ten years later." So the dataset excludes students who do not apply for loans? (i.e., this analysis penalizes schools who admit the folks most likely to make lots of…

> So the dataset excludes students who do not apply for loans? (i.e., this analysis penalizes schools who admit the folks most likely to make lots of money, and the schools that have the lowest expected student contribution.)

It penalizes (or at a minimum, undersamples in a nonrepresentative way) schools with their own, non-loan, aid programs.

This probably very badly hurts schools like Caltech, since it means that there (unless Caltech no longer has the essentially full-coverage need-based aid they had when I went -- unsuccessfully, I graduated elsewhere) they are only counting people who are making the unwise choice of taking loans when they have no need given their current resources.

That this will skew the data badly should be obvious.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#69

Post by jegutman »

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…

As a former Caltech undergrad it's hard to really disagree with the conclusions. I wouldn't be surprised given what I've seen / read if this changes dramatically over the next decade based on changes already taken place.

Median is also possibly not what an incoming Caltech (or MIT, or Harvard) student should optimize for though given that many of them will have relatively safe downsides. Mean for Caltech might be quite high (I don't know for sure). But given that I overlapped with multiple people who have certainly made large sums of money since graduation (about 10 years ago), I'm thinking it might look favorable for Caltech with a small student body.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#70

Post by jegutman »

jegutman wrote: post #69
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…

As a former Caltech undergrad it's hard to really disagree with the conclusions. I wouldn't be surprised given what I've seen / read if this changes dramatically over the next decade based on changes already taken place. Median is also possibly not what an incoming Caltech (or MIT, or Harvard) student should optimize for though given that many of them will have relatively safe downsides. Mean for Caltech might be qui…

Worth noting based on a paper linked from the pypy 4.0 thread[0] that maybe the most fare would be a geometric mean of salaries instead of an arithmetic mean.

[0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5673

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