Brookings "Value-Added" College Rankings

https://www.brookings.edu/research/using-earnings-data-to-rank-colleges-a-value-added-approach-updated-with-college-scorecard-data/

I did a quick search and did not see any references to these rankings but I found them, and their methodology very interesting and I thought people should have these to contrast the USNWR and Forbes rankings.

An interesting study; lots of insights, assuming - and it’s a big assumption - you can read between the lines. For example, this is not a measure of which college graduates make the most money. Rather, this is a measure of how much money a graduate makes in relation to what they might have been expected to earn given their socio-economic and racial background. Thus, wealthy LACs like Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Pomona and Carleton with their lofty cohort of well-prepared, high-scoring upper-middle class students, are somewhere near the bottom of the ranking while colleges like Brooklyn’s Long Island University, Atlanta’s Spelman College, and business school chains like DeVry and Bentley tend to be near the top. The obvious drawback is that it doesn’t quite speak to excellent students for whom Harvard is only the beginning of their college search, and are not terribly interested in careers in bookkeeping, other back office occupations, or in engineering.

I mean as with any study, you should ready about its methodology. For me, salary, roi, and that sort of stuff are more important than a pretty campus, school spirit, or other stuff like that

Salary and ROI are only available in pretty weak and tainted data, unfortunately.

When they put stanford next to milwaukee school of engineering, you know that nothing makes any sense by this measure.

@ewho that’s because it’s not a ranking of “which one is best” overall. It’s a ranking of “which ones boost your earnings more compared with your predicted earnings”. This is why Yale ranks quite low on this list – because its graduates earn less than other schools which those same students could plausibly have gotten into (like Harvard) and what the average Yale student would be expected to earn given their financial condition before college (which closely correlates with test scores). This doesn’t mean Harvard is better than Yale. But from a purely financial perspective, Harvard contributes more to your future earnings than Yale does. It’s not comparing Stanford with Milwaukee SoE or saying Stanford grads earn the same as the latter.

@marvin100 why do you say that?

I’ve written about it a lot on here, but it’s just not the most reliable data. It also rests on some assumptions about the purpose of education and the goals of students, and those are assumptions I don’t find fully convincing.

The Brookings data comes from the College Scorecard database, which does not depend on self-reported data (as payscale.com does). College Scorecard gets post-graduate earnings information from tax records. Nevertheless, a focus on alumni earnings could hurt colleges that have many alumni in relatively low-paying academic or public service jobs (especially if many of them come from affluent families with high expected earnings).

A school like Swarthmore or Reed might be tempted to consider a low Brookings score as a badge of honor. Still, a few other colleges do get much higher Brookings scores despite high PhD production or Peace Corps participation rates.

@marvin100 - isn’t it based on data filed with FAFSA applications (tax data)? I don’t see how that would be unreliable.

As for assumptions about the purpose of education or goals of students, that’s another matter altogether. I don’t see how these rankings make any such assumptions. Theyr’e not saying these are the “best” colleges, but very specifically the colleges that provide the “best financial outcome” (which may or may not be what students want, and isn’t the purpose of education though it’s sadly increasingly becoming that). But in any case, that has no bearing on the Scorecard data.

In the Brookings two year college rankings, ITT Technical Institutes rank near the top for value added. They went out of business in September, and I’d question the value they added, as did the federal government when it pulled their funding.

That data is woefully incomplete.

It assumes that alumni are all seeking out the highest paying jobs, when in reality, many people forgo such careers for various reasons. For example, many people from top-10 schools turn their backs on, say, Wall St. / K St. jobs in order to teach, perform social work, or do other work that more fully satisfied their ideals. That doesn’t at all indicate the paucity of options that this sort of broad-brush “analysis” presumes and suggests.

I think @marvin100 is close to the school of thought all college rankings are useless. If college rankings didn’t exist, it would be interesting to see how people would go about choosing colleges.

I’m sorta close to that, @roethlisburger , although I think rankings are useful to see the general perception of schools (by broad strokes) among those who pay attention to such things.