NPR Uses DOE Data to Create Three College Rankings

Parents Forum
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The government released their massive database but declined to create any formal college rankings, so NPR took on the task, creating three different rankings:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/18/440973097/obama-wont-rate-colleges-so-we-did

The top 10 from each ranking:

Schools That Make You Money

  1. Harvard
  2. Princeton
  3. Stanford
  4. Babson college
  5. Georgia Tech
  6. Georgetown
  7. Penn
  8. Univ, of the Sciences
  9. Harvey Mudd

Schools That Emphasize Upward Mobility

  1. Harvard
  2. MIT
  3. Stanford
  4. UC Irvine
  5. Cal State Stanislaus
  6. UCLA
  7. UC San Diego
  8. Cal State LA
  9. UC Berkeley
  10. Columbia

Schools That Make Financial Sense

  1. Duke
  2. Penn
  3. Stanford
  4. Georgetown
  5. MIT
  6. Harvard
  7. Columbia
  8. Notre Dame
  9. Harvey Mudd
    10.Yale.
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Oops - Left out MIT. The correct top 5 on the first ranking are:

  1. Harvard
  2. MIT
  3. Princeton
  4. Stanford
  5. Babson
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I think you need to be careful with the “Schools That Make You Money” concept. In most (but not all) cases there’s a strong correlation between the percentage of a school’s student body majoring in engineering and computer science, and the earnings of its graduates 10 years out. In today’s economy, engineers and computer science majors tend to earn handsome livings straight out of undergrad. MIT is a fine engineering school, to be sure; 57% of its graduates major in engineering or computer science, and MIT graduates on average earn $91,600 10 years out. But it’s not clear whether MIT engineers and CS graduates individually earn more than the engineering and CS graduates of other top engineering/CS schools; it is clear, however, that most other top schools don’t have as many engineering and CS grads, pushing up MIT’s average.

Similarly on the West Coast, Stanford grads earn $80,900 10 years out; 28% of them are engineering or CS majors. Across the Bay, UC Berkeley grads earn $62,700 10 years out, but only 15% of them are engineering or CS majors, about half the rate of Stanford.

In Michigan, University of Michigan grads earn a respectable $57,900 10 years out; 20% of them are engineering or CS majors. But the public university in the state with the highest earnings 10 years out is actually little Michigan Tech at $60,100, where 66% of the graduates are engineering or CS majors. Graduates of a somewhat obscure private university, Kettering, earn even more, $74,900; fully 90% of Kettering grads are engineering or CS majors.

In New York, RPI grads (63% engineering or CS majors) earn $81,700, more than graduates of Cornell ($70,900, 21% engineering or CS) or Columbia ($72,900). Among Ivies, the lowest salaries are among Brown ($59,700) and Yale ($66,000) grads, but those schools produce only 9% and 8% engineering and CS majors, respectively, lowest in the Ivy League–along with Harvard, as always an exception.

There are other factors as well, such as local and regional cost of living. No doubt there’s a lot of geographic mobility among graduates of top schools, but a large percentage will end up staying relatively close to their alma mater, and it’s no secret that places like Boston, New York, Washington, LA, and San Francisco have a high cost of living and generally higher salaries to compensate for it relative to the Midwest, South, and Mountain West. As best I can tell, the Department of Education College Scorecard salary figures aren’t normalized to account for these differences. Thus the typical University of Chicago grad earning $62,800 in Chicago would need to earn $70,000 in LA, $71,000 in Boston, $73,000 in DC, $86,000 in San Francisco, and $115,000 in Manhattan to enjoy a comparable standard of living.

The point is, if you just want to earn a decent living straight out of undergrad, engineering and computer science are fine things to study. But don’t be dazzled by the per-school average salary figures, which partly just reflect how many engineering and CS grads a school produces relative to its total student body, and partly are influenced by the cost of living where the school is located.

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It would have been nicer if they had taken a longer, harder look at the Not Top Institutions that the vast majority of students end up studying at. In their own words:

“These rankings only show the top 50 out of 1,829 four-year programs. Most students in the nation aren’t attending these schools. And most students narrow their search not by any of these criteria but by geography. We’ve omitted the bottom of the charts in this post. Those worst performers are arguably more important to spotlight as they are the most proportionately harmful. Even if it is hard to come to agreement on the best way to rank schools, spotlighting the worst actors by any criteria would be closer to Obama’s original intent.”

What really matters is whether or not colleges that non-stellar students get admitted to will help those students graduate in a reasonable amount of time without a boatload of debt and with the skills and attitudes that will help them get a good starting job so that they can advance professionally.

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Happy- great post.

But I’d add it would be even MORE beneficial to evaluate the ways the non-stellar students can increase their chances of success regardless of which college they end up at. Or help kids understand that staying in college an extra year to complete a second or third major is rarely a good idea. Or help kids understand that transferring without an action plan often means an extra semester or two to graduate. Or help kids understand that waiting until the 7th semester to meet with an adviser to make sure that they are on track to graduate- not just the number of credits (which most students fixate on) but also WHICH credits- is often too late.

Etc. Kids need a plan- whether they are at a top 50 or a bottom 20.

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Another reason MIT engineers make money is they go to Wall Street. We were at a local MIT event and while they’d all majored in engineering - no one was actually working as an engineer.

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The stories were so…lacking. Poor journalism about a very complex system.

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The most interesting aspect of these rankings is how hard the Wharton professor must have had to work to come up with a ranking scheme that placed UPenn as the top Ivy :slight_smile:

His use of 6 year average salary rather than 10 year median salary does give some insight into how skewed the salary distributions are at some of these schools, though.

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@mathmom is right - I don’t think it’s engineering that’s skewing the salaries as much as the fact that the elite schools are the primary recruiting grounds for investment banks, private equity firms and consulting firms, where a higher percentage of the grads than at other schools work in the industries and easily out-earn engineers handsomely right out of the gate. Not to mention the fact that another decent chunk of these future captains of industry attend law school (including many top law schools) so the 10-yr salary is also embellished by these graduates.

However, I also agree with other posters who say that the article and rankings are lacking for the vast majority of students out there. And, that it would be best served if the government is spending all of this money on the effort, that more info about how a broader range of students could optimize their college education and make smart choices would actually be the result of all of the work. But that would probably be asking too much, given the current state of the government…

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Another totally useless ranking.

What good is it to be told that moon rocks are the best rocks to landscape your garden if 99.99% of people don’t have access to rocks from the moon.

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Compare #10 Columbia and #4 UC-Irvine in the “upward mobility” ranking.
The only sub-ranks in which UC-I out-performs Columbia are in the percentage of Pell grants and first-gen students. If you’re a very-low-income first gen HS student, chances are you will be eligible for a Pell grant whether you attend UC-I or Columbia. If the ranked factors were an important basis for your choice, and assuming the sub-rankings are accurate (and indicative of your own situation), then why would you choose a college with a higher net price, higher default rates, lower graduation rates, and much lower alumni median wages?

This is another illustration of how these rankings reflect selection effects, not treatment effects of college programs. They reflect student demographics, not necessarily academic quality or potential return on investment for a given individual. This is more or less true of some other college rankings as well.

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Yawn… @bclintonk for the takedown.

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@tk21769, depends on what the rankings are for. If they are for prospective students, you may have a point. If they are for someone trying to discern who serves society better or something like that, then you can argue that a greater percentage of Pell students is a big deal.

And of course, not everyone can get in to Columbia.

As an aside, it’s too bad that the government website doesn’t let you rank by default rate.

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That’s why each person should do their own research into what’s best for them as opposed to depending on someone else’s work.

If people did their own evaluation, 99.99% of them would probably find that moon rocks aren’t the best garden rocks. For one thing, the cost is substantial…

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I also want to point out again that in this case “10 years out” doesn’t mean 10 years after completion of the undergraduate degree–it means 10 years after enrollment. So it’s really six years out, or even less for a lot of people.

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Oh, I love these rankings. Sooner or later, my kids’ podunk colleges are bound to show up somewhere on someone’s list de jour. Talking about (social) mobility, I just dropped my kid off at her college last weekend and I am sure her college is number one in term of transportation immobility.

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Except that in most cases it’s not the elite schools that show up at the top of the charts in salaries 10 years out. In New York, for example, Columbia and Cornell come out #12 and #13 respectively in top salaries 10 years out, behind a bunch of health care specialty schools and engineering schools including RPI, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, and SUNY Maritime College. In New Jersey, the 10-year salaries of Princeton grads lag behind those of Stevens Institute of Technology, primarily an engineering school. In Illinois, graduates of the Illinois Institute of Technology are earning more than Northwestern or University of Chicago grads 10 years out. In fact, alumni of some engineering-heavy schools like Stevens, RPI, and Rose-Hulman make more 10 years out than the alums of any Ivy save Harvard. Graduates of engineering specialty schools like WPI, Kettering University, and the Colorado School of Mines make more 10 years out than graduates of Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale, or Brown, and WPI grads also make more than Princeton grads.

I agree with those who say alumni salary is a one-dimensional and rather shallow metric of an education’s worth. I also agree that 10 years measured from the onset of college is an arbitrary and even silly point for a snapshot, given that in many professions including law, medicine, and business management a person is far from their greatest earning potential at that point. And I believe it’s true, because I’ve always heard it, including from members of my own family who are engineers, that engineering salaries tend to start out high and progress up to a point, but then plateau, unless the engineer takes a career turn into management. If that’s the case, then a 10-year snapshot may give an especially distorted view, making engineering appear more lucrative relative to other fields than it will turn out to be in the long run. But that said, given all we hear about all the elite school grads going straight into lucrative careers in i-banking, private equity, and consulting, I’m actually surprised that the salaries of graduates of the elite schools don’t stand out more than they do relative to engineering school grads.

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[QUOTE=""]
But that said, given all we hear about all the elite school grads going straight into lucrative careers in i-banking, private equity, and consulting, I'm actually surprised that the salaries of graduates of the elite schools don't stand out more than they do relative to engineering school grads.

[/QUOTE]

Take a look at this article - at 75%-90% (I assume those are IB and the likes), ivy graduates are doing quite well.
Engineers do not come even close to these numbers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/09/14/this-chart-shows-why-parents-push-their-kids-so-hard-to-get-into-ivy-league-schools/

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I wonder if it has something to do with the time frame within which the government was collecting the earnings data for this ScoreCard. 5-6 years after graduation to those elite school graduates going straight into lucrative industries happens to be time when some of them are back in graduate/professional schools re-charging. If so, then their tax returns of those years will drag the average down significantly. And, since the current Scorecard is based on the data from Class '05 and '06 or entering class of '01 and '02, I suspect that the number of graduates on federal financial aid was even lower back then (?). That minus those who went back to graduate schools would result in a very small sample…

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“Oh, I love these rankings. Sooner or later, my kids’ podunk colleges are bound to show up somewhere on someone’s list de jour.”

Probably will. A college ranking corollary to Warhol’s rule about everybody being famous for 15 minutes is that every college eventually gets to be Top 10 in some ranking somewhere.