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The Economist's US college rankings

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Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#11

Post by armaansarkar »

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…

Didn't they kinda address this?

"The bar is set extremely high for universities like Caltech, which are selective, close to prosperous cities and teach mainly lucrative subjects. If their students didn’t go on to extremely high-paying careers, the college would probably be doing something gravely wrong."

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#12

Post by hackuser »

Income is a poor measure of college education. The problem is that the valuable benefits of college are difficult to quantify; income has importance and is quantifiable, so I understand the temptation to use it as a metric, but it doesn't represent of the values of a college. It's like using the number of lines of code as a metric to represent the value of a piece of code - it's quantifiable, significant in some ways, but not representative of the code's value.

I much prefer the Times Higher Education model, especially their reputation survey. They survey 10,000 tenured and published academics worldwide, using what looks like well-designed methodology [1]. These are people in a position to have expert knowledge about the qualities of various universities. Yes it's imperfect and those people have bias too, but I can't think of a better model:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

One excellent alternative is Washington Monthly's rankings. Their approach:

We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). More here:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings-2015...

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[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-reputation-rankin...

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#13

Post by fiatmoney »

There seems to be a major issue with cost-of-living adjustments as well. Several rather obscure California colleges are highly ranked, and I assume this is because both wages and costs are higher in California, where many of their graduates stay after college.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#14

Post by selimthegrim »

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 world from Caltech? They are turning out somewhat eggheadish very good Google engineers but without the reorientation towards entrepreneurship that MIT at least has with Sloan, the Media Lab, etc. Over the last 10 years, student life has become progressively more proscribed as the administration seeks to make campus a tamer version of Princeton. Caltech's purpose was to produce scientific leaders of the mold of Oppenheimer, Mark Wrighton, et al. - people who could both do research at a high level and manage institutions while providing a useful counterpart to the institutional drift that comprise NSF and NIH review panels. It's sad that the college that prides itself so much on the elite and supposedly self-selected nature of its student body and touts the supposed freedom and creativity offered doesn't trust its students. It may be that the faculty collectively take them less seriously than in the past, I don't know.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#15

Post by ryandrake »

hacknat wrote: post #2

It would be very cool if you could sort by percentage differential between the over/under and expected earnings. I think sorting by that parameter would produce some really interesting results.

Agreed. Ranking by raw dollar values means that schools in very expensive areas (or that feed into very expensive areas) will have exaggerated scores and end up either really highly ranked or really low.

Another interesting study would be to see whether a child's college attendance correlates with a better or worse standard of living from their parents'. Maybe look at Father's salary at age 30 and child's salary at age 30, and see if the attended college is significant. The question being: If you're born rich, you tend to stay rich, and if you're born poor, you tent to stay poor. Does college choice matter?

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#16

Post by impendia »

armaansarkar wrote: post #11
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…

Didn't they kinda address this? "The bar is set extremely high for universities like Caltech, which are selective, close to prosperous cities and teach mainly lucrative subjects. If their students didn’t go on to extremely high-paying careers, the college would probably be doing something gravely wrong."

I dunno, how about pursuing careers as scientists rather than as hacks for the finance industry? Is that "gravely wrong"?

And as far as being close to a prosperous city -- that is because Caltech is near the world hub of the entertainment industry. A Caltech education is mostly irrelevant to finding employment there.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#17

Post by leroy_masochist »

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, very high number of students who go to work for lucrative family businesses immediately upon graduation. In the case of W&L (which provides a great liberal arts education mind you) it's mostly southern good ol' boy/girl types. At Babson / Bentley (which provide great undergrad business educations), a huge chunk of the student body are the scions of the economic elite in developing countries, who are getting schooled up so they can be ready to be put in charge of something at a young age.

My hunch is that the Economist's "expected earnings" methodology wasn't granular enough to take these idiosyncratic attributes into account, and that its r-squared of .85 might not be a rigorous number.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#18

Post by mynameishere »

Well, I'm glad my shitty school beat Yale (almost last) so handily. Really, I don't think they could have come up with a worse metric. If you simply took each school's equivalent of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yale_University_people

...and just sorted it by # of entries, you'd have a far superior list.

Re: The Economist's US college rankings

#19

Post by digikata »

_gwlb wrote: post #4

This tool would be a lot more useful if it allowed for filtering by chosen course of study. For example, University of Washington has a median earnings that is slightly below expected, but I can pretty much guarantee that their computer science graduates are earning well above median.

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...
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