In addition to educational quality (1/3 weighting), MONEY’s college rankings weighs heavily in its methodology outcomes (1/3 weighting) and affordability (1/3 weighting).
Well, I love lists as much as anyone and am glad I was clueless enough years ago to land at #20 University of Maryland and dodged a bullet by not choosing to go to #164 Carnegie Mellon - phew!
Not a believer of this list…
Haha! Love this list. My alma mater comes in at #42. Nowadays I wouldn’t get in! Great list.
On the surface, this ranking’s strength appears to be that its methodology seems to have been appied democratically across all colleges, without tweaking to ensure that specific, desired schools automatically finish in top places.
You can tell that the list has problems.
College SAT Cost Salary
1 Princeton 1500 19k 67k
2 CUNY 1240 10k 51k
3 Michigan 1380 17k 61k
…
11 UVA 1360 16k 56k
…
16 GaTech 1400 14k 65k
The list tries to balance this…
“where can the most academically challenged, cheaply get in the best environment, and graduate to make the most money.”
It’s really a mathematical mess. There is probably one key metric that is weighed too highly.
I suspect that metric to be 6yr graduation rate.
Again, all rankings have problems, but I think the one this suffers from is that it uses percent receiving aid (etc) as a measure of value, but that is in no way useful for an individual student. Financial situations and prices are unique based on aid, and this ranking doesn’t consider the value for one family/student but all of them aggregated together. So for the individual, the value is lost.
Their build your own feature is actually interesting if you don’t use those particular features and evaluate your own prices. Even better, they should make one where you enter your price estimate (based on actual offer or NPC + a merit aid estimator) and spits out a value ranking from that. That would actually be a really cool tool, especially if you could input NPC values + raw stats + home state in one place and get a merit/FA estimator for many schools, and then see how they stack up in terms of value for an individual.
http://time.com/money/4846386/how-money-ranks-best-colleges-2017/
for complete methodology
@Greymeer Yes, it is 6-yr grad rate; and most other ranking websites look at 6-yr grad rates more as you know, although I think that 4-yr should be looked at more.
In our house, there is no academic redshirting at $65k/Year - it’s a Bachelors in 4!!!
- Behind Quinnipiac, Rider, Montclair, South Dakota State, and even lowly Kean. Plus a whole bunch of other schools that we're equal to, if not better than. This ranking is the height of fake news.
My own rating system was far better than this crap.
Haha, let’s not get angry about this. It’s surely a quirky ranking list, but they have their own methodology for college rankings, and this is how the ranking calculation turned out. What can we do about it?
Have to agree with ^^^. Fake News!
Everyone gets to be famous for 15 minutes and every college gets to be Top 10 on some ranking somewhere.
Let’s not confuse “I disagree with this” with “fake news”. Nothing in this article is “fake”. This is all a subjective matter in the end that all hinges on what you value in a college. Not to mention that judging where your school is at as a barometer is biased to say the least.
@PengsPhils One of the top 10 public schools for best value is ranked #467 by TIME Money Magazine. It’s not just that I disagree with this, it’s that it’s absolutely nonsensical. We should be at least top 250. I know you’re probably happy with where your school is, but this ranking is a joke. Like what even is John Brown University. Lol.
Besides, what is it to you if that’s how I judge a ranking system?
There is literally no ranking system that isn’t flawed in some way.
If you read above, I’m not a fan of this ranking system either. Nor would I be happy with my schools ranking, but again, the point is that judging a ranking system off where someone’s school is placed is not an unbiased method, and would not yield better systems of ranking colleges.
The assumption that a ranking system is nonsensical because it doesn’t yield the expected results is a circular assumption that will only breed ranking systems that confirm what people already think. If there is a flaw in a ranking system, you should be able to articulate what it is in the methodology.
My post was mainly pointing out that this ranking is not “fake news”.
@PengsPhils fair point, just looked at your earlier comment. I also think it fails to account for regional differences in CoL/wages.