<p>I was looking through ROI statistics recently at: College</a> Education Value Rankings - PayScale 2012 College ROI Report</p>
<p>UofR falls at 162. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett found that only returns from the top 150 are positive. Anyone have any comments regarding this?</p>
<p>I addressed payscale in a thread about Vanderbilt. </p>
<p>When you are confronted with material, what is the first thing you should check? The integrity of the data. With Payscale, we have several ways to do that. Sticking with this ROI thing, look at the methodology. Though there is a whole page about methods the only important part is at the top: they rely on surveys completed for payscale. How many? They don’t even begin to say. That’s a question mark. Then you can check the rankings for 2 thing: obvious issues and stability. I looked through a few years and saw schools bouncing all over the place. UR was 50 places higher the year before. Other schools were even more off from year to year. And the list seems odd. Why is Emory also near 150? Questions they don’t begin to answer.</p>
<p>If you look at my other post, you see why. When I checked the UR data, they had a handful of responses. All looked to be from the same company. All were certainly in the same field. Not representative of anything. I checked versus the other school cited and they had all nurses plus one college president. Not kidding. There is no indication the data is any better than that crap. None.</p>
<p>The people who do this kind of ranking should be tarred and feathered. My guess is they are trying to build a brand and they pump out nonsense in the hopes of building more of a mass of information that may at some point be valuable - at least to their own ROI. </p>
<p>So my comment is this: try critical thinking. It’s useful.</p>
<p>The methodology of the study is highly biased.</p>
<p>The survey specifically excludes any and all graduates with graduate or professional degrees. Nor does the study account for a differences in the earning power of different disciplines. Note that nearly all of the top-ranked 25 are basically engineering schools.</p>
<p>GIGO, as they used to say compsci classes.</p>
<p>The methodology is real hoot. </p>
<p>My favorite GIGO story is the one about horses. Input the number of horses per person in 1890. Increase population to today with no cars. Generate the number of horses needed. Now take the amount of horse**** each horse produces per day. Spread that evenly over the cityscapes. We’d all be knee deep in it. Horses in, horse**** out. And I’m not even counting the horsepee.</p>
<p>Frankly, UR will have a ton of opportunities for those willing to seek them out. The one who determines whether there will be a return on investment is you, and the work you’re willing to put in. They ranked Harvey Mudd as number one, and its a fantastic school, but the success of students there has been dependent on their respective efforts. And it also has a lot to do with the major you’re choosing. A lot of the top schools on that list are engineering schools. Basically, it’s saying that majoring in philosophy or liberal arts will not be a solid ROI.</p>
<p>No, it doesn’t say that. It says that junky data using a complicated but unpersuasive methodology generates a junky pseudo-ranking and you can think it says what you want. </p>
<p>Please, never make the mistake of taking garbage as meaningful. Just because it’s put up on a website doesn’t mean it deserves any credibility at all.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This. Add to that people skills. Success in life is a combo of what you know (good knowledge offered at UR) and how well you play with others (this is 100% dependent upon the individual). Who you know can come into play too, but that happens at many colleges (including UR).</p>