@smartalic34 - USNews measures faculty compensation in a way that penalizes schools for hiring younger faculty. It puts all the salaries (full professors, associates, assistant professors) into one basket and then averages them out. Consequently, every elite college periodically suffers a decline in the USNews faculty compensation matrix whenever a large cohort of faculty retire.
However, there’s no mystery to where endowment size has the biggest impact after salaries: financial aid. Wesleyan, Amherst, Williams and all the other colleges and universities in the pricey high end of the spectrum are practicing the same accounting trick: make the sticker price as high as possible then discount it as much as possible without going broke. The gap between the original price and the actual tuition collected goes on the books as an expenditure. They all do it. Hopefully, Wesleyan will be able to do even more of it in the future.
^^^ This isn’t just about accounting tricks. Most of these schools have about half their students not on financial aid. And so far the market from this more affluent group has proven “price insensitive” – meaning they have not found a sticker price that discourages applicants who would not qualify for aid. And the more they charge these families, the more those families effectively subsidize the financial aid given to other students who do require aid.
I think that’s correct, @citivas . And, being able to raise tuition as much as you like while getting credit for it as financial aid is about as close IMO as any institution can possibly get to having its cake and eating it, too.
The Forbes results have been duplicated in a different poll from a completely different running dog of capitalism, published today, again demonstrating how using even a modicum of “outcome” measurements can produce results that diverge greatly from the USNews rankings. I’ve removed all the research universities in order to better compare it to the USNews’ NLAC rankings:
Bingo! The only shocker is that Wesleyan moved up 10 ranks, thus, demonstrating how important outcomes such as earnings ten years out college, environmental factors such as diversity of students and diversity of faculty, all allow Wesleyan to make up ground when they are included in any rankings methodology.
Someone did a bit of cutting and pasting (kudos, @Postmodern) on the main WSJ/THE thread. Wesleyan came in 45th overall which was not bad for a LAC, considering WSJ included spending on graduate as well as undergraduate programs in its methodology. And, the salaries are based ten years after entry as a freshman, not ten years after graduation, as stated above.: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19960730/#Comment_19960730