US NEWS Ranking, A few surprises

@websensation “Deep down inside, there is a part of me which says “Forget brand name colleges like HYPSMCC etc, I will send my kid to an OOS Honors College for free.” But if it was my life, I probably would forego attending brand name college as a full pay (knowing what I know and having experienced an Ivy college on financial aid for not much money), but when it’s your kid’s life, it’s definitely harder to do (when your kid wants to attend the brand name college because he feels it’s a better fit etc.) because my own parents sacrificed things for my education. Therefore, I realize a lot of decisions I make is based on emotions even if I would make a different choice for myself.”

Was just talking with a close friend whose freshman kid is attending H. This kid absolutely loves it there and is the perfect fit for this extremely bright, intellectually curious, and humble kid. She has opportunities that are not readily available to the typical college student. For example, even though they have only been in fall session a few weeks, she and 2 roommates had an impromptu dinner with a congressman and later got to see a lecture/speech by John Kerry. For this political science/government student, you could not ask for a better fit. There are limitless opportunities at this school (and similar top colleges). An OOS honors college is just not going to be the same experience no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

@OHMomof2 good one on BYU, which may be a special case, but I think you may be staring at the answer in the face:

From study.com:

Bachelor’s Degree in Home Economics
Bachelor’s degree programs in home economics prepare students to educate others in matters related to personal finances, resource management, and interpersonal communications. Graduates are prepared for careers as educators, teaching home economic concepts to high school students. Some programs require candidates to complete student teaching assignments before graduation. Applicants to home economics bachelor’s degree programs should have strong math skills and need to have some experience with macroeconomics and microeconomics.

It will be something you would most typically find at state universities that are tasked with producing teachers. I don’t know why Amherst would have one. It could be an error, but students can put together anything these days: https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/interdisciplinary-major-program

Believe it or not, there actually are standardized degree level codes for federal data collection (IPEDS). The ETC may be using this data. It could also be 3 people in a room making stuff up. https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/VisInstructions.aspx?survey=10&id=30080&show=all

I’ve seen “ROI” calculated various ways.

Below I have ranked the top 25 ROIs for Public & Private Universities using 4 methods.

  1. Raw Salary over a 20 year period.
  2. Raw Salary, Including the cost of college
  3. Raw Salary, Including the cost of college, Including the Cost of Living
  4. Raw Salary, Including the cost of college, Including the Cost of Living, Including Graduation Rate


Public & Private Schools ROI (* public schools)

<h1>[1] Raw Salary                                    </h1>

1            Harvey Mudd College
2            <em>United States Naval Academy (</em> NOTE: Ignoring Academies 5 years of service)
2            *United States Coast Guard Academy
4            Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5            California Institute of Technology
6            *United States Military Academy
7            Harvard University
8            Stanford University
9            Stevens Institute of Technology
10           Princeton University
11           *United States Air Force Academy
12           Babson College
13           Carnegie Mellon University
14           University of Pennsylvania
15           Washington and Lee University
16           Rice University
17           Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
18           Worcester Polytechnic Institute
19           *University of California, Berkeley
19           *University of California, Merced
21           *Georgia Institute of Technology
22           Santa Clara University
23           *Colorado School of Mines
24           Clarkson University
25           Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

<h1>[2] Include Cost of College                                           </h1>

1            Harvey Mudd College
2            Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3            California Institute of Technology
4            <em>United States Naval Academy (</em> NOTE: Academies drop because they lose 5yrs to mandatory service)
5            *United States Coast Guard Academy
6            Stanford University
7            Harvard University
8            Stevens Institute of Technology
9            *United States Military Academy
10           Princeton University
11           Carnegie Mellon University
12           Babson College
13           *Georgia Institute of Technology
14           Rice University
15           University of Pennsylvania
16           *Colorado School of Mines
17           *United States Air Force Academy
18           Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
19           Worcester Polytechnic Institute
20           Washington and Lee University
21           Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
22           *University of California, Merced
23           *University of California, Berkeley
24           Clarkson University
25           *Missouri University of Science and Technology                                        

<h1>[3] Include Cost of College, Include Cost of Living                                              </h1>

1            *Georgia Institute of Technology
2            Rice University
3            Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
4            *Missouri University of Science and Technology
5            Kettering University
6            *Colorado School of Mines
7            *Michigan Technological University
8            *United States Air Force Academy
9            Duke University
10           Harvey Mudd College
11           *South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
12           University of Notre Dame
13           *United States Naval Academy
14           Union College
15           *University of Oklahoma, Norman Campus
16           Carnegie Mellon University
17           Massachusetts Institute of Technology
18           Case Western Reserve University
19           Saint Mary's College
20           *Texas A&M University
21           *University of Minnesota, Rochester
22           Washington and Lee University
23           *University of Cincinnati
24           Vanderbilt University
25           University of Pennsylvania                                                

<h1>[4] Include Cost of College, Include Cost of Living, Include Graduation Rate                                          </h1>

1            Rice University
2            Duke University
3            University of Notre Dame
4            Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
5            University of Pennsylvania
6            Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7            Washington University in St Louis
8            *Georgia Institute of Technology
9            Harvard University
10           *United States Naval Academy
11           Vanderbilt University
12           Washington and Lee University
13           Princeton University
14           Carnegie Mellon University
15           Northwestern University
16           Stanford University
17           *United States Air Force Academy
18           Harvey Mudd College
19           University of Chicago
20           *University of Michigan
21           California Institute of Technology
22           Carleton College
23           Babson College
24           Brigham Young University, Provo
25           Dartmouth College


Re: #342

Not sure why you exclude the first five years for military service academy graduates, since (a) they are paid, and (b) they are the jobs that the students at the military service academies want.

But also note the prevalence of engineering-heavy schools in the upper ranks – the mix of majors has a heavy influence on a school’s financial ROI of graduates, even though a biology major at a school filled with engineering majors is unlikely to find the school’s overall financial ROI of graduate to reflect his/her likely post-graduation outcome.

Of course, Wall Street targets are another class of schools that find their way into financial ROI rankings.

Totally agree with @ucbalumnus

ROI of college education is all about major, just like buying a house is all about location. What is the most regretted college major? English.
https://moneyish.com/ish/this-is-the-most-regrettable-college-major-in-america/
… just another survey which was quoted everywhere.

That links to https://www.trade-schools.net/learn/would-you-change-your-major.asp which has the surprising result that biology was the #5 major for satisfaction, after accounting, computer science, information technology, and history. The bottom five were English, fine arts, political science, mathematics, and business.

I.e. majors with low financial ROI included those with high and low satisfaction in this survey. Mathematics could be a high financial ROI major, but it was near the bottom in this survey. Business was near the bottom, but two of its specialties, accounting and information technology, were near the top.

So there may be more to satisfaction than financial ROI. Perhaps expectations when choosing a major may be relevant. If someone chooses a low financial ROI major knowing that it is a low financial ROI major, s/he may not be dissatisfied, unlike someone who chooses a low financial ROI major but had (mistaken) expectations of high financial ROI. Though that does not explain biology majors’ high satisfaction, since it seems from these forums that many prospective biology majors are not aware of the difficult biology job market for those who do not get into medical school.

@nrtlax33

LOL.

But

Here’s another ranking entity.
http://time.com/money/best-colleges/

@ucbalumnus like most of these surveys not enough detail provided as we know that a lot of Biology majors go on to Med school, even if it takes a few years. Still with no details on the survey is just wild guessing.

^ “Not sure why you exclude the first five years for military service academy graduates, since (a) they are paid, and (b) they are the jobs that the students at the military service academies want.”

It’s correct.

The calculation does pay them for those years.

The first calculation gives them 20 full years of the payscale starting rate and mid career rates. “Ignores 5 years of service”.

The second docks them because for the first 5 years, they are making 30 to 40k. They are paying for college.

Again if that is the case, then exceptionally poor data collection, pay for an O-1 is $4500/mo plus subsistence pay at $258/mo plus housing allowance $1500/mo (average), so approximately 6300/month (some of it is tax free), with pay increases built in is $75,600/yr (not including other special pay) which is way more than most are going to get coming out of college. Really need to research some basic facts before posting.

semi-irrelevant diversion:

Combined LAC/ university rankings have been mentioned on this thread, FWIW these are nothing new:

Basically everyone applying to colleges and/or universities, where these are both options, has to make their own evaluation of these options, and formulate some criteria or other to help with this.

The college guide books “back in the day” sorted schools into groups by selectivity, and these groups included both LACs and universities.

More recently, a combined “invisible hand” ranking was published for several years on the usenet group soc.college.admissions.:
http://collegeadmissions.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/laissez-faire-1999-2000.txt

Now back to our regularly-scheduled rankings commentary…

I found this to be an interesting historical perspective (it’s from 2000) on how the USNWR results were adjusted to get the “right” result:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2000/09/01/playing-with-numbers/

It’s notable that the original version of the analysis (which was discarded) apparently took some of the same “diversity” factors into account that are this year boosting the public colleges with lots of Pell grant recipients. But now the weighting is relatively limited, presumably so as not to displace the colleges that are “expected” to come top.

^Yes, I’ve had this conversation many times. USNews, from the beginning, was designed to reflect conventional wisdom as much as possible which I find strange because isn’t that the opposite meaning of prestige?

I thought that was exactly what prestige was, at least in the context of colleges. After all, can anyone really argue Harvard isn’t prestigious? Why not? Because everyone thinks it is and you’d be in a tiny minority. Prestige is more or less the sum of common opinion of the group in question: national prestige is the national population, regional is regional population, within an industry is the people in the industry, and so on. How could it be anything but?

It’s called America’s “Best Colleges” not “Most Prestigious Colleges”. A list purporting to be of the latter would probably just elicit a collective yawn. The problem comes when people pretend that a list that was manipulated to reflect prestige actually measures scientifically which colleges are “best” (whatever that means).

@monydad fascinating, thank you for that. Interesting to see the admit rates, costs, cross-apps and so on in that link.

^^^But, isn’t conventional wisdom just another way of saying, “the wisdom of the crowd”?

I do think of Best Colleges and Most Prestigious Colleges differently also.

I strongly recommend you read the link on #352. (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2000/09/01/playing-with-numbers/)
Also read “14 Reasons Why US News College Rankings are Meaningless” – https://www.liberalartscolleges.com/us-news-college-rankings-meaningless/
At least WSJ/THE has fixed the biggest flaw:
USNWR does not include measures of actual education. Why? USNWR said: colleges don’t make the data available, it would be too expensive to gather, much of it simply can not be quantified. But WSJ/THE does not ask colleges for data. They spent their own money to gather the data and they have quantified it. You might not like the way they did it but at least they have done their work.