The Ultimate College Ranking to End All Rankings

This is based on one factor essentially - OPPORTUNITY in the fields or careers colleges students are most interested in. I have done extensive research and looked at placement data to see which colleges truly are the best at providing opportunity in the areas top college applicants are looking for. I am willing to defend this ranking if there are any questions. Other minor factors considered were selectivity, academic quality, and success of alumni. So here it is:

  1. Harvard
  2. Yale
  3. Stanford
  4. Princeton
  5. MIT
  6. Columbia
  7. Brown
  8. Dartmouth
  9. U Pennsylvania
  10. Caltech
  11. Duke
  12. U Chicago
  13. Northwestern
  14. Cornell
  15. Williams, Amherst
  16. Johns Hopkins
  17. Rice U, WUSTL
  18. Pomona, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, Georgetown
  19. U Notre Dame
  20. UCLA
  21. Vanderbilt
  22. U Virginia
  23. Bowdoin College
  24. Emory
  25. Wellesley
  26. U Michigan
  27. U North Carolina – Chapel Hill, USC
  28. NYU
  29. Carnegie Mellon U
  30. Tufts, Middlebury
  31. Wesleyan U
  32. Boston College
  33. U.S. Military Academy
  34. Claremont McKenna College
  35. Barnard College
  36. U.S. Naval Academy

Sure, show the data that backs this up.

It’s a subjective ranking, so it’s not based on a mathematical formula. I did consider placement though at highly competitive positions in business or top mba programs, associates at top law firms, residents at the most competitive/top residency programs, and placement at top PhD programs data that I have collected. I also considered data I have on prominence of alumni through looking at wikipedia page views and google data. though this was VERY MINOR I also considered athletics (placement in the highest paying professional athletics through draft data) and diversity (for reasons I can explain). For academic quality looked at princeton review, niche, and us news data among other sources. selectivity can be objectively determined with numbers but you have to apply a huge grain of salt to that data because it is not audited and provided directly by the schools. I’ve done years of research so I consider myself an expert in this stuff.

You appear to have ignored — or weighted lightly — earnings data, an aspect that would seem to relate to your core criterion of opportunity. For example, with respect to a comparison of similar schools, Harvey Mudd, which does not appear in your ranking, graduates students who later register higher early career salaries than those from MIT, a school that places highly in your ranking.

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/harvey-mudd-college-1171

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/massachusetts-institute-of-technology-2178

I didn’t ignore earnings data. I want to improve the ranking so if you feel Harvey Mudd should be included and you have good reasons, I can modify it. But for earnings, you have to compare major to major because STEM dominated schools will by nature have higher salaries because of the majors being chosen by students so you have to adjust for that. It only makes sense to compare a Harvey Mudd Computer Science Major with a Dartmouth Computer Science Major for example not a Dartmouth English Major.

According to US News, the average salaries for the same major are higher for MIT than Harvey Mudd (104200 vs 101500 for comp sci and 84400 vs 81800 for engineering, as examples).

also, something people rarely consider are racial differences in salaries; MIT is more diverse as well. for example, Harvey Mudd is only 3% african-american. selecting for higher diversity can lower your overall salary numbers, and that has to be taken into account. same applies to Caltech. Here are household income numbers by race:

1 Indian (Ancestry from India) 107,000
2 East Asian 85,349
3 White 57,865
4 Middle Eastern 56,331
5 Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander 50,987
6 Hispanic or Latino 46,882
7 Black or African American 40,528
8 American Indian and Alaska Native 39,719

I actually didn’t include Harvey Mudd because I was only looking at schools ranked highest by US News and HMC was ranked #23 so I may have overlooked it. I would probably put it right after the U.S. Naval Academy though perhaps - I’d have to look at my data. One of the reasons I wouldn’t rank it higher is the prominence of alumni. There are very few noteworthy/famous alumni that graduated from Harvey Mudd, even taking into account per capita information.

There are a few types of data from colleges which you can never trust. One of them is placement data.

Furthermore, what do you mean by “providing OPPORTUNITY”? How do you measure it? Since one of the main factors that matches the rankings of your list is the income of the students, claiming that the college provides opportunity is ridiculous. A kid in the top 20% by income has opportunities no matter what college they attend.

All that you list ranks is the income and opportunities that their students already had when they were accepted. Not one of the colleges on your list has fewer than 65% of their students from the top 20% by income.

Well, they also rank according to how difficult it is to be accepted, so of course, when you accept only the wealthiest and most accomplished students, the have opportunities.

Basically it is yet another ranking based on income and selectivity (AKA popularity), as well as endowment, which is, again, an indicator of the income of the students.

REVISED RANK:

  1. Harvard
  2. Yale
  3. Stanford
  4. Princeton
  5. MIT
  6. Columbia
  7. Brown
  8. Dartmouth
  9. U Pennsylvania
  10. Caltech
  11. Duke
  12. U Chicago
  13. Northwestern
  14. Cornell
  15. Williams, Amherst
  16. Johns Hopkins
  17. Rice U, WUSTL
  18. Pomona, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, Georgetown
  19. U Notre Dame
  20. UCLA
  21. Vanderbilt
  22. U Virginia
  23. Bowdoin College
  24. Emory
  25. Wellesley
  26. U Michigan
  27. U North Carolina – Chapel Hill, USC
  28. NYU
  29. Carnegie Mellon U
  30. Tufts, Middlebury
  31. Wesleyan U
  32. U.S. Military Academy
  33. Boston College
  34. Claremont McKenna College
  35. Barnard College
  36. U.S. Naval Academy
  37. Harvey Mudd College

If you are looking at the wealth factor, if you look at the percentage of students who did not apply for financial aid at the most expensive colleges, it does not align with this ranking, so it isn’t just a measure of parental income at all. that’s just not factual. the nytimes data, if that’s what you are referring to, does not appear reliable. people who go to college in general have higher incomes than average. have you considered the difference between these particular schools and the overall college population or just the population as a whole?

Ummm, the data collected by Equality of Opportunity Project is very reliable, and it is definitely more reliable than the curated data that college present on their own websites.

However, again, please tell me what you mean by “OPPORTUNITY”?

what you are essentially arguing is that the typical student at these schools when applying for jobs or being evaluated by graduate schools that they are earning their positions based on how much money their parents make, which obviously isn’t a factor in the overwhelming majority of cases - I would argue that it’s actually relatively rare. also, if you look at the nytimes data, the income of a “poor” student by percentile and those of “average” or “rich” students aren’t that different statistically (when measuring alumni salary outcomes) which suggests that poor students are getting similar opportunities as students whose parents are higher income.

did you look at the counts in that data? the sample sizes are way too small to draw conclusions on individual colleges. it only makes sense to look at it in trends across schools or something. opportunity is self-explanatory. getting the option to do what you want to do after college. a definition is “a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something”

Honestly, it’s as good as any other ranking, and pretty close to my tiers: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html

Pretty close to the Business Insider hiring manager ranking as well: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/hiring-managers-say-these-are-the-best-colleges-2015-8%3famp

Well my kid’s school isn’t on here, but it’s on other lists… so obviously yours is wrong? Ha!

Your top 5 universities’ Pell grant percentages:

16% Harvard
16% Yale
16% Stanford
19% Princeton
18% MIT

About a third of all college students get Pell grants, whose eligibility goes up to approximately the median household income.

Also, about half of their students get no financial aid, meaning that they come from families with income over $260,000 or so (top 5% or so income).

So, yes, there is a strong skew toward scions of wealth.

“minor factors considered were academic quality and success of alumni.” Those are both very important factors that contribute to how good of an institution a school is. I mean it’s an interesting list but this is by no means the “ranking to end all rankings.”

Whearbar7, did you look at Babson and if so where did it fall? One of my sons almost went there and the “opportunity” they were pitching for business was ivy like… just wondering. Thx!