The value of university ranking

The ranking of 1275 u.s degree granting institutions using the deviation from the expected mean of earned income.
The value of university: Our first-ever college rankings | The Economist

 

Rankings are fun and can stimulate some discussion. I suppose that they're supposed to help in the decision making process but I don't know if they're really useful in that regard (in general). For me it's always interesting to throw some stats around and so your posted article is an interesting slant on the subject. I'd like to cross-reference those numbers with program costs. Anyway, thanks for the post.

 

I am not sure if ranking is just about fun. Today my alma mater posted on my LinkedIn about its top 10 ranking in Canada. https://www.lakeheadu.ca/about/news-and-events/news/archive/2015/node/28583
Over the years, I have seen postings by other universities touting their ranking. I have seen nasty articles about getting a low ranking and the boycotting or refusing to participate in future ranking. A fair amount of data are provided directly by the universities.

 

The thing is, I don't like ranking a school by alumni income. It would be great if ones income was solely attributable to their education and nothing else. But that simply isn't true.

If my father were a hedge fund manager and I was a fourth generation Harvard legacy I'm probably going to have a pretty high salary. However, I'd probably have my family to thank more than Harvard for that.

It's an interesting data point. But earnings do not equate to program quality (and vice versa). As Kizmet says, an interesting way to spark a discussion, but I can't imagine using this to guide a decision.

I often tell the story of how, as a high school student, I went to visit Kings College in Wilkes Barre, PA, just a few blocks away from my high school. And they boasted an average salary for graduates of their McGowan School of Business (all undergrad) at $43,000. People were applying left and right. I was ready to apply on the spot. But my father didn't feel it passed the "smell" test.

Wilkes-Barre is economically depressed and has been for a pretty long time. A good portion of the students at Kings are locals and $43k jobs are pretty tough to come by. It also wasn't terribly uncommon to run I to Kings grads (alongside PSU and Wilkes grads) bagging groceries. So where , exactly, were they making this money? Come to find out some years later that Kings would hire a chunk of their graduates into 1 year temp jobs in the school's administration. My best friend from HS graduated from McGowan, got a salary in the high 40s for a year and THEN was forced to face the reality of a job market. But Kings didn't care at that point, they already got to count his salary among their stats for recruitment.

I have no idea if a kings does this intentionally to boost their numbers or if this is an unintended consequence of them being a small school trying to help their alumni. Either way, graduate earnings can be a useful data point in some ways, but I would never use them by themselves.

If I walk away from PennState with $30k in debt and a $40k job, I'm probably going to be better off than the graduate of Lehigh who walks away with $100k in debt and a $55k job.

You would also have to look at how many of those schools attract students from the Greater NYC area and likely from more affluent families. Poor families in Brooklyn don't sent their kids to private universities in Connecticut. And if you come from an Uptown family that does you have a very different sort of access to jobs when you come home after graduation.

Still, I think it's an interesting article and I appreciate you including it. But these questions and this sort of discussion is, in my opinion, the chart's greatest value.