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The Economist's US college rankings

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Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#91

Post by carpdiem »

_delirium wrote: post #40
digikata wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interestingly, having gone to Caltech, I suspect that its extreme focus on STEM research actually hurt it here. Mostly because that focus results in a very large portion of undergrads going on to grad school (much larger % than any other university), and grad students don't earn very much.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#92

Post by ThrustVectoring »

alistairSH wrote: post #78

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 methodology is trying to remove the admissions department's effect on student success, leaving behind everything else (faculty, peers, course structure, university prestige, money vs prestige focus, etc).

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#93

Post by ThrustVectoring »

et2o wrote: post #26

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.

Conversely, schools with a monomaniacal focus on industry do rather well. I'm specifically thinking of Rose-Hulman - an undergraduate-only engineering school - ranked at 23rd.

Also, a very similar argument to what you're making explains why I don't think that the gender wage gap is an big issue.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#94

Post by [deleted] »

obastani wrote: post #86
haberman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not saying that each college you attend has no effect on earning power. It's just that I can perfectly predict the effect of each college on your earning power. Does that make sense? If I have an oracle that tells you "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.

[deleted]

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#95

Post by Amorymeltzer »

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-... )

Submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480851

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#96

Post by BookmarkSaver »

selimthegrim wrote: post #85
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the money thing is paralleling something else entirely - given the supposed caliber of student that comes into Caltech, is Caltech really making them better scientists than if they had gone elsewhere (or at least better scientists than they were turning out in the 1970s). That to me is a open question.

Yes, but Caltech students have some of the highest rates of going into academia. Which pays well on a general scale, but compared to where engineers and developers go onto it drags the stats down.

They do admit that the metric only gauges financial success and is imperfect when it comes to accounting for alternative priorities. But do you seriously believe that CalTech provides one of the worst "financial bumps" even accounting for the quality of their admissions? I find it incredibly hard to believe.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#97

Post by selimthegrim »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #96
selimthegrim wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the money thing is paralleling something else entirely - given the supposed caliber of student that comes into Caltech, is Caltech really making them better scientists than if they had gone elsewhere (or at least better scientists than they were turning out in the 1970s). That to me is a open question.

Yes, but Caltech students have some of the highest rates of going into academia. Which pays well on a general scale, but compared to where engineers and developers go onto it drags the stats down. They do admit that the metric only gauges financial success and is imperfect when it comes to accounting for alternative priorities. But do you seriously believe that CalTech provides one of the worst "financial bumps" even…

It's not at all clear that every Caltech student is going to be an engineer or developer. Recall Jim Simons getting booted out from Princeton because he sucked at programming?

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#98

Post by haberman »

obastani wrote: post #86
haberman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not saying that each college you attend has no effect on earning power. It's just that I can perfectly predict the effect of each college on your earning power. Does that make sense? If I have an oracle that tells you "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.

> and the oracle is exactly correct, then under this model, The Economist assigns every college a score of 0.

If what you are saying is true, then I agree that the ratings are nonsensical. But I don't think you are correct. Their methodology consists of comparing two numbers:

1. the observed earnings

2. the estimated earnings if the same students had studied elsewhere (presumably some average)

So if we had your oracle, the numbers 1 and 2 would be different for the two colleges, not the same.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#99

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nilkn wrote: post #67

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…

The problem with your method (which this analysis is attempting to although may not actually correct) is what if the difference in the actual earnings between the schools is due to quality of the students admitted into the school rather than the increase in the students earnings that the school causes. For example, if your options are

(A) A school that admits 1000 people with IQ of 200 who go on to earn an average of $100,000 and 100 people with IQ of 50 who go on to earn an average of $1,000

(B) A school that admits 100 people with IQ of 200 who go on to earn an average of $1,000,000 and 1000 people with IQ of 50 who go on to earn an average of $10,000

(A) has median earnings of $100,000 while (B) has median earnings of $10,000, so by your criteria (A) is much better. However, (B) has much better outcomes for both groups of students.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#100

Post by TheCoelacanth »

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…

I think the premise of the analysis is good (at least if you are optimizing for income), but the actual implementation is questionable simply because they don't have access to enough data about the students.
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