81–90 of 108 posts
My university asked for my earnings only one time. The categories maxed out at 70k+. They might be higher on that list if they took a more precise survey.
Something feels "off" about a methodology that basically ranks all of the "top" state schools as poor values. Take the top-3 state schools in Virginia (by most other rankings, that's UVA, W&M, and VT). All three are nationally recognized. And all three are competitive that you need very good grades and a solid set of extra-curricular activities to be accepted. UVA ranks the lowest of the three, yet has the highest ac…
> "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 t…
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That was my thought too, to make a simplistic example if a university had both say an engineering school and an art school, it might presumably do worse than a university with only an engineering school. So this metric might favor smaller, focused schools which happen to concentrate on education areas with high median salaries...
> So this metric might favor smaller, focused schools which happen to concentrate on education areas with high median salaries... I don't think that part's necessarily true. If a school focuses on an area with high median salaries, the model will take that into account in the predicted salaries, so the school will have to have even higher actual salaries than typical for the field (and its input demographics, SAT sco…
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This is not bad. It is simply one of many possible ways to rank colleges.
But it is a serious flaw in the methodology. It says nothing about the quality of education or the boost in earnings that a college will provide, if you are specifically going to a school to do so . At the very least they need to somehow account for individuals that go to the top schools but aren't looking to go into lucrative careers. CalTech is a common example being cited here. It is basically impossible to deny r…
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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…
> 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. If I'm understanding correctly, that result would indicate a world where the college you attend has no effect on your earning power. ie. choose any college you want, bec…
"if you got to Harvard, you will make $80,000, if you go to MIT, you will make $86,000",
and the oracle is exactly correct, then under this model, The Economist assigns every college a score of 0.
The Brookings study [1] mentioned by the the Economist offers this interesting analysis: 1. Graduates of some colleges enjoy much more economic success than their characteristics at time of admission would suggest. Colleges with high value-added in terms of alumni earnings are often focused on training for high-paying careers in technical subjects. ... 2. Four college quality factors are strongly associated with high…
> (Personally, I think the most valuable things gained in college or in any education don't happen to have much monetary value.) Well, someone does, because they're charging for it.
Good point; I should have said, I don't think they are things that earn you money.
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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 profession…
I just find your kneejerk response of "Anything that rates my school poorly is wrong" and pocket dismissal is counterproductive to actually rating school performance. Selection bias is an actual demonstrable problem in school rankings, and coming up with some way of separating the effect of a school's selectivity from it's educational results is critical if we wish to improve the productivity of educated professional…
I see what you are saying. If their methodology ranked my school in the middle of the pack (instead of in the top 2%, which I believe it deserves), saying in effect that the advantages of a Rice education were those that its students brought with them, then I would be annoyed but I can see how that could be fair.
But the bottom 0.5%? I went there and I know better. (And as an academic I know a lot about how universities work and how they differ from each other.) I do feel that I am justified in calling bullshit immediately.
This is hilariously bad. Schools that produce academics as opposed to those who go into high-paying professions are penalized, when in fact (at many of the top institutions) producing academics is one of the main goals.
This is not bad. It is simply one of many possible ways to rank colleges.
This is hilariously bad. Schools that produce academics as opposed to those who go into high-paying professions are penalized, when in fact (at many of the top institutions) producing academics is one of the main goals.
That doesn't make this ranking list bad. The rankings system explicitly explains, in painstaking detail, that the system is designed to measure return on degree, empirically. That means they must use empirical data.
You also presume it is not possible to measure academic success empirically.