Some quick thoughts:
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I’m leery of including aspects of a university’s cost (to the student/family) directly in a rating system (as Forbes does, I think, with the student debt weight). Yes, of course cost matters, but:
1a) It varies a lot per student, and so the AVERAGE cost for folks to attend a given U. matters far less to a given student than their own cost.
1b) Even if the cost were the same for everyone, entangling an input (cost) with outputs (educational quality, post graduation success) seems to confuse matters. A Honda Accord is probably a better vehicle than a Nissan Versa, by most reasonably objective measures. It’s also more expensive. Rather than try to combine these two things into one measure (is the Accord ENOUGH of an improvement over the Versa to justify the higher cost), it’s probably better to just present output data (the Accord is better), and list input data (what it costs) alongside, and let the reader judge. Yes, I know that some consumer ratings magazines may factor cost and value together, but that’s often for items where the ranges for both are more constricted, and in any case, where the cost is unlikely to be as variable, per buyer, as it is for colleges. -
For the Forbes list, is there more detail, online or in the print magazine, on the subcomponents? They put a lot of weight on a measure of graduate’s success. But there’s many ways to attack this issue, and in any case, I’d be interested in seeing the specific data for this kind of thing, per college. I think I’ve seen a past version of this, either online or in print, but couldn’t easily find it more recently.