US NEWS Ranking, A few surprises

I expect 6-year grad rates have a lot to do with the students’ socioeconomic class–students who struggle to pay, who have a constant juggle to balance school and work, who may have to help support their families, whose families’ finances are tenuous enough that one misfortune could be disastrous are always in danger of taking time off or discontinuing their education entirely, which is not at all the case for the vast majority of students with ample parental financial support and a reliable safety net.

@marvin100 – that’s exactly what I meant when I said that. The irony is the highest need, hardest to serve students by and large attend colleges with the least resources. Particularly true for community colleges (who I realized aren’t ranked) that have teeny tiny endowments and less funding per student. It’s a cryin’ shame IMHO.

Agreed, @AlmostThere2018 – using that as such a weighty metric perpetuates the same old power structures and gatekeepers.

When you get away from the realm of highly ranked (in the USNWR rankings that were are discussing here) colleges, the percentage of students with “ample parental financial support and a reliable safety net” may be less than the “vast majority”. About a third of undergraduate students get Pell grants ( https://trends.collegeboard.org/student-aid/figures-tables/undergraduate-enrollment-and-percentage-receiving-pell-grants-over-time ), so they come from lower half income backgrounds. But even many upper half income families often have difficulty funding their kids’ college, especially if the kids are were reasonably college ready but not top-end enough to get into the most selective colleges with the best financial aid or earn large merit scholarships or live in a state with good in-state cost and financial aid.

@ucbalumnus – True. Which is why when we talk about college affordability it should be about total cost of attendance and unmet financial need based on a student’s household type and situation. Very little about college affordability is monolithic. 25% of today’s college students are parents, as one example. Center for Law and Poverty has done some really interesting research on percentage of household income that families need to spend to go to college and it’s eye opening, b/c, as you said, once you get below highly selective colleges financial aid is very anemic and Pell only covers about 30% of public college costs today – compared to more than 70% in the 1970s.

Higher ed policy is my professional jam – but I think we’re digressing. . . (sorry mods!)

@ucbalumnus - I wasn’t saying that students with ample support form a majority; I was referring to the majority of the students with ample support (in other words, a minority of the students with ample support struggle to graduate in six years nonetheless).

Schools with 4 year graduation rates above 85% include:
Carleton
Columbia
Cornell
Harvard
Harvey Mudd
Johns Hopkins
Pomona
Princeton
Swarthmore
UChicago
UVa
Yale

Schools with 4 year rates below 50% include:
Drury University
Liberty University
Oklahoma University
University of North Florida
Western Carolina University

Source: Kiplinger’s

Which of these two sets of colleges do you think offers better student academic support and better financial aid?
Do schools in the first set seem to be less rigorous than schools in the second set?
Which of the two sets would you expect to be higher ranked, on average?

Georgia Tech, by the way, has only a 41% rate. MIT’s and Caltech’s rates are a bit lower than Ivy rates. Strong engineering programs may tend to require more than 4 years in relatively many cases. Notwithstanding that issue, US News has chosen a feature that does (generally speaking, on its face) seem to do a fairly good job of identifying well endowed, highly-respected colleges.

But if low 4y rates at some colleges (other than tech schools) are due largely to higher concentrations of low income students (or some other confounding factor), what evidence are we missing that some of these schools have academic programs as strong as the ones at much higher ranked colleges?

Perhaps we should all put US News rankings in with all the other on-line lists - it has been given way too much clout from admissions officers (who are tasked to try to get higher on the list), guidance counselors (who use it as a crutch) and all of us who quote, tout, and often bow to the almighty US News list! I too was foolish to do that the first time around but so thankful my DS ended up at a small LAC for Nursing, already involved with research and small classes. I don’t want to put them out of business but really enough!!

@tk21769

My point is that who the college serves is not a confounding factor at all but rather a key variable that predicts graduation rates. If you ran a regression analysis with graduation rates as the dependent variable two of the factors with most predictive power over the rate would be 1) income of the students at the college and 2) financial resources of the college. Rigor of academic programs (albeit hard to quantify) might be predictive as well, but with less explanatory power.

What this means is that when USNWR uses graduation rate it is in fact ‘double measuring’ other measures in their index. For example, financial resources.

All that said, I do believe graduation rates are very important information for consumers – students and parents – to know. But I think it’s only a college’s relative rate of graduation success broken out by subgroup that should be considered a factor of quality. As I said earlier, that captures the a college’s ‘value add’ and ability to out perform the student population and resources factors that are ‘baked into’ any college’s graduation rate based on who its serves and its budget.

Finally, as fate would have it, found this in my morning news scan, for those who are interested.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/09/18/college-rankings-need-more-focus-graduation-rates-low-income-students/?utm_term=.5c3881f426c2

@AlmostThere2018…thanks for the excellent Washington Post article above detailing why college rankings need more focus on graduation rates for lower income students. US News has finally recognized my alma mater of UC Riverside (up 39 spots…biggest bump of any college in the nation), and Georgia State (up 36 spots) as true pioneers in social mobility where there are equal high graduation rates across all races and income levels. To see many more colleges following this lead in the future will enhance society in the process of positively transforming lives for all.

True.

Besides the financial aspects of the students and the financial resources of the college, the major predictor of graduation rates is academic credentials of the students on entry. A college full of 3.9 / 1500 students will generally have higher graduation rates than a college full of 3.0 / 1100 students. Note that a few colleges may have graduation rate reports by incoming academic credentials, such as https://www.umb.edu/editor_uploads/images/oirp/2016_HS_GPA_impact_on_outcomes_webversion.docx .

So it should not be surprising that a college full of 3.9 / 1500 students from mostly wealthy families, and which gives good FA to those from non-wealthy families, has high graduation rates, but that a college full of 3.0 / 1100 students from mostly FA families, and which does not give good FA, has low graduation rates.

But for the same student choosing between different colleges, the student’s academic aspects are obviously the same, but net price after FA may be an important distinguishing factor in determining how risky each college is in terms of the possibility of not being able to graduate. I.e. a 3.9 / 1500 student has a very high chance of graduating from an academic standpoint at Harvard or UMass - Boston, but it is possible that net price differences may make him/her more likely to graduate one versus the other.

Average student income, or college resources, may well correlate strongly with graduation rates. Does that mean high family income per se or big college endowments per se drive up graduation rates? You could park a billion dollars of new money in accounts at a random low-ranked university, and if they did not spend it to create a better learning environment, the graduation rates would stay low. You could transfer all of Harvard’s full pay students to a random low-ranked university, and without any other changes, many of its students probably still would drop out. What drives up graduation rates, directly, would be factors such as well-prepared students, good mentoring, appropriate academic standards, and adequate FA. Although all those things tend to cost money, money is not sufficient. But I agree, a better ranking might be one that operationalizes the features of an excellent learning environment, then measures those features without “double counting” the money it takes to pay for them.

It’s been two weeks since this thread started. But, people are still “debating” USN&WR rankings. That’s really sad. Outcomes matter more than an artificial list prepared by a magazine. Anyone choosing a school based on USN&WR rankings deserves what they get. They are in the business of selling you their product (which is a magazine). They are absolutely not experts in the field of higher education!

I have commented before that at research universities, professors’ focuses usually are not teaching. To hear the same comments from the mouth of a MIT student, you can watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN_uGfDtRHo ) from 2:55.

In generally, I found the videos from Crimson Education pretty informative. Yes, a lot of cliché answers. But there are definitely values.

Any rankings are the results of some methodologies. As long as you know the methodologies, you can get something out of the them.

This girl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqWa8wkWGlI) looks like a typical kid who is obsessed with rankings. I am wondering if she realized that the program she was accepted to, Information Systems, is in Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. I thought she was interested in Computer Science, which is part of Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

I met a rising senior at CMU’s Gates Center a couple years ago, who spent more than 10 minutes telling me he would definitely NOT choose CMU again if he had another chance. Why? He wants more out of college experience, not just computer science. He also hates the location. I bought him an ice cream later thanking him for a good lesson.

@nrtlax33 I really don’t understand the point of these comments about CMU and MIT. Are you suggesting that students only go to these two schools owing to their rankings in USNWR? I understand you spoke to a student at CMU SCS who didn’t like the school or Pittsburgh in general, but he may have been a nonrepresentative sample. It is hardly the case that one can only do computer science there. My understanding is that the SCS student must do a minor in another area. Furthermore, CMU is known as having one of the finest drama schools in the country, has a great psych dept. (my field), and a reasonably strong business program. My knowledge of the psych dept. comes from reading papers and going to conferences with people from that department (not from rankings). Now, I don’t think either CMU are MIT are perfect, but also don’t think that have achieved their successes by “gaming” the ranking system. Both schools were well known when I was hunting for colleges, in the ancient pre-ranking days.

Anyway, my kiddo is at CMU, isn’t in computer science, and is having a fine experience. In particular, because Dietrich has sparse offering for grad students, he gets an opportunity to directly interact with professors. In his mind, one of the perks IS the location (urban setting, good food, good transportation, loads of culture, not too pricey.)

Outstanding art, too!

Students who could get into Harvard are unlikely to drop out due to academic reasons, and those who can afford Harvard full pay are unlikely to drop out due to cost/FA reasons. It is likely that, in this hypothetical scenario, “drop outs” in this group would really be transfer out because a random low-ranked university would not have the prestige that is probably a big attractor of students to Harvard (they may not be able to transfer to Harvard, but they will probably try “prestige upgrade” transfer to higher-ranked universities).

From today’s WSJ:

Please note that WSJ/THE has a totally different US college rankings which are focused on undergraduate education. The US rankings include LACs. The two ranking methodologies are totally different. Do you feel USNWR’ best college rankings are very similar to THE’s research oriented global university rankings?

^ Maybe. An alternate prediction is that many would leave because they won’t find the objective conditions that top students want (and that they associate with higher-ranked colleges.) This is a hypothetical scenario so we’re just speculating. I do think family income, selectivity, rigor, and prestige all influence graduation rates, but there may be other important factors as well.

Among the Kiplinger T100 “best value” LACs, only 3 have 4 year graduation rates below 50%.
Among the Kiplinger T100 “best value” public colleges, I count 44 with 4 year graduation rates below 50%.
Presumably, the LACs (most of which are private) collectively do have higher average family income.
So how much of the graduation rate difference is attributable to income … and how much to other differences, for example in student support services, bureaucracy, or student-faculty engagement (which admittedly may be hard to measure and compare)?

Below are a few comparisons of graduation rates and family incomes.
The list includes LACs, state universities, and private universities.

Family Income … 4y GR … College
$30,000 … 49% … Berea College (LAC)
$58,000 … 25% … University of Houston

$58,700 … 69% … Spelman College (LAC)
$75,300 … 32% … Liberty University

$106,600 … 59% … Drew University (LAC)
$115,400 … 52% … Michigan State

$110,900 … 75% … Beloit College (LAC)
$123,900 … 58% … UT Austin

$140,400 … 85% … St. Olaf College (LAC)
$154,000 … 76% … Michigan AA

$145,400 … 86% … Harvey Mudd College (LAC)
$180,700 … 73% … Tulane University

$134,500 … 88% … University of Chicago

Source for income statistics: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/
Source for graduation rates: USNWR

You are missing the biggest non-financial factor, which is admission selectivity. Colleges that are more selective and have academically stronger students tend to have higher graduation rates.