No surprise that if you select only for high earnings, you get a list of mostly colleges with high numbers of CS and engineering majors. The tool would be better in this respect if there was a filter for intended major, which could screen colleges for having the major, and adjust earnings based on the major (like from what is shown on College Scorecard).
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According to Niche dot com - Harvey Mudd is an A- party scene:
www niche dot com/colleges/harvey-mudd-college/
So I guess the ranking varies with the understanding of any given student body what constitutes a party?
If you use the drop down, you’ll see the source of the data and how it was ranked there. They are just scouring the available information for you:
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The school I cannot find is Oregon State, which graduates at least 66%. Maybe it doesn’t have data on more than three of the categories they measured, but I would be very surprised…
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As far as I can tell, the only publics on their list are Portland State and Univ of Oregon.
Yes, the Oregon State’s latest CDS from 2019/20:
shows the graduation rate from two years ago, but I suppose it’s possible that some publics don’t set aside “marketing” resources to submit various other data?
Or, maybe there was no recent CDS available?
Yes, I was surprised about that too, since Oregon State is one of my kid’s favorite schools. Only U of Oregon appears on there.
interesting tool but my D23s criteria is heavily weighted by research/publication record, which isn’t an easy proxy here. Also the major here makes a huge difference. As noted above, earning potential correlates with major more than with quality of school. Still, her current faves end up on the top 20 of the lists…
You just don’t know engineers like i do. These are crazy people. I’ve seen some have a second beer at a party, and some will even have both wine AND beer.
I noticed the college calculator that the NYT has on their online front page, and tried it out even though my kid is already in a college she loves. I skewed the filter a bit towards her school, placed it in a suburb, because it is in one, and it did not appear. Switched to a city and it showed up.
Anyhow, I wasn’t overly impressed with its calculating, now that I am a quasi professional on choosing colleges after 2 years or more on this site. 
Now, I wonder what other people think about the tool’s usefulness. Anyone tried it out?
This happens with many online college tools. Every one we did for college searches did not include the colleges our kids were attending.
The college board search was hilarious. We put in DSs criteria, and it gave us 300 or so options (none were where he attended…which fulfilled them all). When we changed one criteria…it gave us ZERO choice.
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Agree, I thought it was pretty useless unfortunately.
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At the very least the NYTimes tool creates plenty of fodder for discussion! For example, using the following filters: small school <3000, highest wage earners, highest academic profile, lowest net price, safest campus and athletics the NYTimes tool came up with these SLACs in the top 10:
- Davidson College
- Williams College
- Middlebury College
- Claremont McKenna
- Swarthmore College
- Pomona College
- Amherst College
- Washington & Lee University
- Wabash College
- Harvey Mudd College
It’s a good idea in theory, but there are many limitations in the execution. For example, if I select 100% high earnings, the top 3 are Caltech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd. I expect the high income primarily relates to having a high concentration of tech majors and being highly selective. I doubt the typical student who selects high income in the tool is looking for a list of colleges with a high concentration of tech majors and low concentration of majors associated with lower incomes.
If I select 100% low sticker price, 4 of the top 5 are University of Wisconsin. I doubt that Wisconsin is actually among the lowest sticker price 4 year colleges for in state, but it’s irrelevant, if I among the vast majority of persons using the tool who lives in one of the other 49 states and has a ~$60k sticker price. If I instead select low net price, the top 5 are all CUNYs. CUNYs do not top any list I have seen of lowest net price for a particular income level, instead they have a relatively large portion of lower income students and only ~2% paying room and board for campus housing. That’s also not what I expect students selecting low net price in the tool are looking for. I could continue.
There are also a lot of other critical things that are missing as inputs to the tool. For example, when I was a HS student, I was a prospective electrical engineering major. There appears to be no way to search for or limit to colleges that offer an electrical engineering major.
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I guess for those are soon starting to make lists for the next application season, it might at least suggest a few colleges for people to research (especially for the majority who don’t really know their ultimate major yet) - and possibly dismiss many for one reason or the other.
But even if one or two new trees are found in this huge forest, then this can still be a useful exercise vs. just looking at positions at US News?
I tried over twenty different criteria and each time the result was Alabama.
Very odd.
What, were you channeling @tsbna44 ? 
Or… insight? 
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Very odd that it has no way to select a specific major/area of study.
Seems an odd result that my daughter should have studied MechE at Swarthmore or Haverford rather than Purdue. I’m surprised they pass the “>50% STEM graduates” filter.
Maybe their economics majors are classified as STEM majors, increasing the total percentage of STEM majors? STEM also includes the very popular biology major.
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Video game parties were included as were ultimate frisbee parties.
this is great, thank you for sharing!
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