Money's "Best Value" college rankings are out and they are somewhat surprising

[OHMomof2]

I’m stopping at 10 because I had to type them out but there are 700+ at the link. Like Forbes, all colleges and Us are in one list, not in four, USNews style.

1 Princeton
2 U Michigan
3 Harvard
4 Rice
5 UC Berkeley
6 Brigham Young
7 Amherst College
8 Cooper Union
9 U Virginia
10 Stanford

http://new.money.com/money/best-colleges/rankings/best-colleges/

Full methodology: http://time.com/money/4393604/how-money-ranks-best-colleges-2016/ - boy do they get into detail here. Nice to see.

[OHMomof2]

…let the criticism begin (where is Yale? MIT? (it’s #11) What the heck is BYU doing there? Is Cooper Union still free? Why is a state school #2?)

It uses Payscale a little which is too bad, but at least that’s only 15% of that third of the weight (sort of…see methodology link above). They say they also adjust that to account for major, which is something people here seem to look for a lot.

[bookworm]

How things do change. In 2005, Caltech was #1. It was almost $10,000 less a year than MIT or SCS at Carnegie Mellon. In addition, they gave merit awards for upper class people.

[OHMomof2]

MONEY’s Best Colleges for Your Money rankings are the first to combine the most accurate pricing estimates available with students’ likely earnings after graduation and a unique analysis of how much “value” a college adds when compared to other schools that take in similar students.

We estimate a college’s comparative value by calculating its performance on important measures such as graduation rates, student loan repayment and default rates, and post-graduation earnings, after adjusting for the types of students it admits. We believe this analysis gives students and parents a much better indication of which colleges will provide real value for their tuition dollars.

I think the part in bold above is a great idea.

[ThankYouforHelp]

I’m not sure about some of their data. For example, they have Pitzer college with the second highest SAT scores in the nation.

[OHMomof2]

@ThankYouforHelp - http://new.money.com/money/best-colleges/profile/pitzer-college/ says 1519 median. Their CDS says 620/30 is the 25 and 720 is the 75 so yeah, that’s wrong.

[ThankYouforHelp]

There appear to be quite a few discrepancies of that nature.

(ps - no knock on Pitzer, it’s a fine college. I just used it as an example)

[Hanna]

It’s also test-optional, which is great, but introduces an apples/oranges problem when comparing to colleges that require scores from everybody.

[panpacific]

So Amherst is #7 but Williams is #49? Seriously?

[NotVerySmart]

^This is how the folks publishing these rankings get their pageviews.

[Erin_s_Dad]

OP, to answer some of your questions, BYU is on there partly because it’s relatively inexpensive

Non-LDS Tuition - Fixed cost based on full-time enrollment $ 10,600
Room and Board - $ 7,448

https://financialaid.byu.edu/cost-of-attendance

Coopers Union still offer 1/2 tuition scholarship to everyone.

As an all honors college, every admitted student receives a half-tuition scholarship valued at $21,000 per academic year (2016-2017).

http://www.cooper.edu/admissions/financial-aid

[ThankYouforHelp]

@panpacific “So Amherst is #7 but Williams is #49? Seriously?”

Yeah, that’s crazy. Academically, Amherst and Williams are basically carbon copies of each other.

Amherst has more outreach/aid for low income students. Maybe that’s what Money Magazine was focusing on? I dunno.

[mitchklong]

The problem with these lists is that they just represent the aggregate, which may not apply to you.

For example if a student is offered a full ride academic scholarship to school X, that school represents a huge value for them, even if it is nowhere on the list. If someone looks at this list but never applies to X, they miss out on a huge opportunity.

[MiddleburyDad2]

agree on Amherst and Williams. then again, Williams is often ranked #1 on LAC lists and Amherst, while never far behind, is always behind, sometimes by more than a few spots. It’s ridiculous either way. Amherst and Williams are two of the very top LACs in the country by any measure.

[OHMomof2]

Maybe that’s what Money Magazine was focusing on?

@ThankYouforHelp They are fairly clear about what they were focusing on: http://time.com/money/4393604/how-money-ranks-best-colleges-2016/

http://new.money.com/money/best-colleges/profile/williams-college/

http://new.money.com/money/best-colleges/profile/amherst-college/

[MiddleburyDad2]

Clearly admissions selectivity was not a major factor in the ranking criteria.

[OHMomof2]

If you break out the LACs only (which you’d really have to do to compare the places of W and A), the top 10 are, I believe,

1 Amherst
2 Pomona
3 Earlham
4 Wellesley
5 Hamilton
6 Bowdoin
7 Davidson
8 Middlebury
9 Williams
10 Bates

…which isn’t so terribly different from USN or other lists. Earlham is interesting though. I know several people who went there (I went to a Quaker HS) and it’s terrific for many reasons but not very selective. However, MONEY says it makes some adjustments for the difference between inputs (students with lower stats) and outputs (success defined in various ways). So that may account for a lot of that.

[twoinanddone]

This was a numbers list. Cost of tuition compared with salaries. Throw in some points for admission statistics. Where were the academies, which usually rank very high because there is no tuition?

[Erin_s_Dad]

Tough to beat tuition of $0 for an ROI…

[OHMomof2]

@twoinanddone

QUALITY OF EDUCATION: 33.3% weighting

For this factor, we used five indicators that provide meaningful information about the quality of a school’s instruction, weighted as shown:

(1) Graduation rates: 35%. Education experts and college officials generally agree that one of the most important reflections of a college’s quality is its graduation rate. (The U.S. Department of Education calls them “helpful indicators of institutional quality”.) Many rankings use this commonly cited federal statistic on the percentage of freshmen that graduate within six years. Because of its importance and wide acceptance, we assigned this measure a comparatively heavy weight.

(2) Value-added graduation rate: 35%. Many education experts and college officials point out that the basic graduation rate number, while useful, is an insufficient indicator of a college’s value because research shows that wealthier students and students who got good grades in high school are more likely to finish whatever college they attend. So elite, expensive schools such as, say, Harvard, would be expected to have high graduation rates. For that reason, we also calculated each school’s relative performance after accounting for the economic background and academic preparation of its students. The higher a school’s graduation rate was above the rate that would predicted for a school with that particular mix of students, the more value that particular college is assumed to have added. This “value-added” graduation rate analysis is widely accepted. (A 2013 OECD paper found that such “value- added measurement provides a ‘fairer’ estimate of the contribution educational institutions.”) Because of its reliability and acceptance, we weighed this factor heavily.

(3 & 4) Peer quality: 15%. Decades of research have shown that undergraduates have a major impact on their peers. Students who room with better students get better grades, for example. By contrast, students surrounded by less conscientious peers—for example, heavy drinkers, video game players, etc.—study less and get worse grades. And students who room or socialize with more successful students tend to get better jobs upon graduation.

Our peer quality measure consists of these two indicators:

Academic preparation of students (10%). We gathered data on the admissions selectivity of each school, as well as the school’s reported average grade point average and test scores of incoming freshmen to estimate the academic qualifications of the student body. While there is controversy over the usefulness and validity of standardized tests, the SAT and ACT tests currently provide the only nationally comparable data on student abilities. In addition, many studies have found a high correlation between test scores and academic success.
Yield (5%). The federally reported “yield” is the percentage of accepted students who enroll in a given college. The higher the yield, the more likely it is that the school was the student’s first choice, or best option, and that applicants have perceive the college’s quality as high.
(5 ) Faculty: 15%. Research shows that students who get more individual attention from faculty tend to achieve more, both in college and after graduation. (See, for example, the recent Gallup-Purdue study.) So we include each school’s student-to-faculty ratio.