From Myth to Measurement: Rethinking US News and World Report College Rankings

There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena. It's just not easy.

It's not easy with science either. Plane crashes killed people like some Cthulhu horror tearing planes out of the sky before they realized square windows create stress points when flying at jet speeds which eventually destroy the plane.

People died because of that design flaw and it wasn't immediately obvious why.

> Employment Rates: Track the percentage of graduates employed in their field of study within six months to a year after graduation.

> Earnings Data: Use data on median salaries adjusted for regional cost of living and industry to assess economic outcomes.

This is a toxic way of looking at education, in my opinion, like it's some kind of vocational training. By this metric, two-month training programs in high-demand fields would be the highest ranked, by far. But often, the subjects which have the deepest impact on one's thinking—and on one's curiosity, intellectual abilities, and life in general—are the ones which have no easy one-to-one mapping to a job. I've taken philosophy courses, and anthropology courses, which have changed my life completely, but I didn't get employment as a philosopher or anthropologist within six months after graduation. The value of education is in how much it can change your thinking, satisfy your curiosity, and make you into a well-rounded person. It's not just whether it can prepare you for some job. And if you reduce education to "median salaries adjusted for regional cost of living" then you're measuring education purely on a sell-out basis.

I quoted the line you used. Show it to your friends and ask them if they think it is rude or not, without saying you wrote it.

> There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena ... it's not easy with science either

Liberal arts majors are particularly bad at it. I doubt they are even aware of what the scientific method is, or how to implement it. We all know that a survey can get wildly varying results depending on exactly how the questions are worded. I also see plenty of liberal arts surveys that use too few samples to get statistical validity, along with clearly wrong interpretations of the statistics. The lack of statistics being a required course for a liberal arts degree is just another glaring problem with liberal arts programs.

As for the DeHaviland Comet crashes, allow me to clarify. The problem with finding the cause was the airplane would disintegrate at high altitude with no warning, and all there was was a rain of debris. Once they gathered up all the pieces, and reconstructed the airplane from the debris, it was immediately obvious that the fault originated in the window corners, and any structural engineer knew why. They then conducted experiments to confirm it.

The problem was not "jet speeds". It was the pressurization/depressurization cycles from flying up to 30,000 feet and then down, resulting in fatigue damage. Square corners are "stress risers" meaning the stress in a square corner is 3x the stress in the rest of the material. The problem did not occur with propeller airliners because they flew at lower altitudes either unpressurized or with little pressurization.

A fix was devised - make the corners round, and a forged doubler was riveted over it. Then this was also tested, and proved sound. And it works because sound methods of design, analysis, and testing was done.

There is simply no comparison with how these things are done in aviation engineering vs liberal arts.

P.S. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Aeronautical/Aerospace, and I did design work on the 757, and have a particular interest in crashes and their causes.

The ones where classes were a breeze and barely challenging at all were the private college prep school and the not-quite-as-rich-but-still-pretty-wealthy high school in the suburban white flight community. My read on the situation was that teachers had figured out that every single parent believed their kid deserved a constant stream of gold stars, and had the leisure time and resources to make their lives miserable until it started happening. Also the white flight school cared a lot about its football team so you better make for damn sure that the classes aren't so challenging that the quarterback has trouble balancing their time spent on homework, practice, and partying.