<p>"The reams of data culled from colleges across the country need to be broadened, put in one place by the federal government and made more consumer-friendly, a Harvard University professor argues in a paper to be released Friday." </p>
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<p>News:</a> Information Unstacks the Deck - Inside Higher Ed</p>
<p>This search tool is off to a great start!</p>
<p>[College</a> Search Tool & University Selection Guide](<a href=“http://www.collegeview.com/collegesearch/index.jsp]College”>http://www.collegeview.com/collegesearch/index.jsp)</p>
<p>The greatest challenge to Harvard’s concept would be tracking employment and income data post-grad. However, I feel the dept of education would be in a position to do this via provisions in the stafford/unsub loans – eg. if you want to borrow, backed by the feds, you have to report your title and income for the next 10 years.</p>
<p>That data would be slightly skewed because it would bypass those that do not take loans to pay for their education. Just a thought though.</p>
<p>Another problem with tracking outcomes is considering graduate school. A lot of lists (like the Forbes: Colleges to get rich list) just remove students who didn’t attend grad school. But at a lot of universities this is cutting out lots of top students.</p>
<p>i think kids should look for quality and not name…why go to a top 20 school if youre gonna be sitting in piles of debt and stress?</p>
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<p>Actually, my interviewer for MIT stressed how people need to realize that you should attend the highest-ranked school they get into because (assuming that they’re competitive) financial aid tends to be so generous it becomes cheaper to go to a top private instead of a top public - and that even if you end up with debt after graduation your top-school degree will pay itself over countless times.</p>
<p>But suppose you’re a full pay family, with merit money being the only possibility. It’s not so easy to decide between $250k for MIT, offers of $100-$175 for some quality private/state school w/merit, and a full ride (or close) at a nice flagship honors college.</p>
<p>Is the price tag really worth it? It takes many decades of hard work, discipline and sacrifice to set aside $250k. Suppose that you’re a lifelong bargain hunter, always searching for the best value. Do you throw away your whole belief system to purchase the glittering prize?</p>
<p>Very tough call.</p>
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<p>It has long been accepted that a college (non-professional) degree is today’s equivalent of what a HS diploma was 40 years ago. </p>
<p>Have we now reached the point of saying that a non-professional grad degree is the new equivalent of a HS diploma? Sure sounds like it to me.</p>
<p>Well, sure, if you talk to people here a lot about it. It also sounds like the only way you can get a good education is if you’re willing to spend $250,000 but I don’t think that’s true (or a healthy attitude to have if you don’t earn at least that much per year).</p>
<p>^^ My sons MIT degree will pay for itself in less than 2 years. I would say it was worth it. He received a very nice financial aid package but assuming he did not he has been one of the fortunate graduates to have a great job and excellent future prospects. It really depends on the student, school, and area of study when calculating how much one should invest in a particular college education. If you look at it as any investment you need to examine who and what you are investing in.</p>
<p>momma-three,</p>
<p>What does he do now?</p>
<p>I watched a financial show last weekend. The general consensus from the panel was to never use your retirement money to pay for your kids college education and only take out loans equal to your first year out of college salary.</p>
<p>I read the article and this is a great proposal! Throughout my just-completed college search process, I wish I had data on what graduates actually achieve. I wish I had known whether or not graduate salaries are enough to be able to repay your debts.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, colleges will try hard to stop this from happening. Colleges are afraid of sunshine, because it would probably reveal some unpleasant truths. Some colleges will be unveiled as not being worth the money. I am afraid that such a service would show that an all too real “college loan crisis” is impending, with many students unable to repay their debts.</p>
<p>Instead, they want to keep on advertising based on vaguely defined “college experience” and nebulous, probably biased USNWR rankings. They like living in a world where you choose based on geographic location. Like all cartels, the colleges have divided up the turf and agreed not to compete on value. Indeed, they increase the real cost of an education every year.</p>
<p>I believe it is telling that no college has already decided to track graduates on their own and advertise based on graduate income and ability to easily pay debts. After all, that would be the best recommendation. I suspect this is being done because it would reveal that some top 20 colleges are not such a good idea financially. </p>
<p>I remember most poignantly an event that happened during a Northwestern session that was trying to get me to choose them (I was accepted to NW). Someone next to me asked about how fast, on average, students repay their debts and specifically, how long it took the rep to repay them. The rep responded laconically that “[we] graduates find it not to be a financial burden. I am happily repaying my debts”. How happy can you be if you are still in debt?</p>
<p>I only wish people will demand to know this information. After all, as Louis Brandeis put it “sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants”.</p>
<p>The author’s yardstick is earnings power and that how well a college prepares every student for a job is the measure of its success. For some students and for some schools, vocational or professional training is the purpose of education and salary is the primary goal. Adapting these kinds of standards I feel would lead to a kind of “teaching to the test” mentality where schools would direct their resources to helping students enter the highest-paying professions and might admit those who it feels would want the education for what it can get them monetarily in life, rather than how that education might be used for higher purposes. Where do public service or arts careers, for example, fit into the equation suggested by this article?</p>
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<p>Kudos to your son but the question remaining is would your son not have succeeded and gotten a similar job if he had gone to State U? And if not, how do you know?</p>
<p>Good friends of mine: Son got into MIT, he chose free state school. He went to MIT for grad school, got his PhD, is doing extremely well in fantastic well known high tech company. Cost to parents?: zero. So for their son they would say “thank god we didn’t spend 250k on undergrad at MIT!” </p>
<p>So who really knows.</p>
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<p>Well, the truth of the matter is, the notion of schools directing their resources to higher-paying professions is essentially happening already. This is particularly salient at the tech institutes. Let’s face it: relatively few students at MIT are going to be entering public service or arts careers; the majority of MIT students are majoring in engineering, and another large chunk are majoring in management at the Sloan School. </p>
<p>Which leads to my next point…</p>
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<p>I personally think the far more salient issue is not so much that certain colleges will be revealed to not be worth the price, but rather than certain majors will be revealed to not be worth the price. Granted, I know this will likely offend some people here, but let’s face facts: with some important exceptions that I will discuss below, you can’t really do much with just a history bachelor’s degree. You can’t do much with just a sociology bachelor’s. You can’t do much with a literature bachelor’s. Much of the entire nationwide humanities/social science edifice does not really provide marketable skills. Students would be better off, at least financially, by choosing a low-tier school and majoring in, say, engineering, than in choosing a high-tier school and majoring in one of the humanities. Many of these students, truth be told, might have been better off financially having not even gone to college at all, but rather should have spent that time learning a vocation such as information technology (IT) systems or plumbing. {For example, I know one high school kid who is thinking of not even going to college at all despite being admitted to several strong schools as he’s already being offered a near-6-figure job because of his strong IT skills, having earned several respected IT certificates and worked as a part-time IT administrator for several years now. Meanwhile, most high school kids just end up wasting their time playing video games, watching TV, and partying.} </p>
<p>Now, to be clear, those students who major in the humanities or social sciences as a pathway towards graduate or professional school may indeed find that the finances will out well for them, and indeed, those who are able to win admission to top-ranked law schools on the road to major corporate law positions or those who are able to eventually obtained tenured hum/soc-sci faculty positions can do very well for themselves. But, let’s be frank, the vast majority of hum/soc-sci students are not headed for grad/prof school. They instead will be heading directly to the workforce, whereupon they will find that their majors carry relatively little market value. </p>
<p>The one important exception is the consulting/banking ‘loophole’ which is available only to those students at the most elite schools from which consulting/banking firms will hire you largely because of your schools brand name. You can be a Harvard humanities major and nevertheless be hired as a highly paid investment banker or strategy consultant, and in fact I know many who have. </p>
<p>But, like I said, this pathway is available only to those who attend the most elite and highly-branded schools. The overwhelming majority of hum/soc-sci students in the country do not have access to this pathway.</p>
<p>A relative spent over $70,000 for two years of college before her son was asked to leave. The college has a low graduation rate which might have been helpful to know before they spent so much money.</p>