The problem is that there is no universal definition of outcome. And there is no universal outcome/resource (expense) curve. And no one is collecting (or at least disclosing) outcome metrics on a level detailed enough to allow a student to adequately gauge their expected outcome at various institutions. I shouldn’t compare my aspirations for med school to a kid with two physician parents coming from one of the best high schools in the country who went to science camps every year. If I’m a standard middle class kid, I’m standing on first base. That kid is already on third. Same thing with a business school/econ department full of kids with Daddy Warbucks business pedigrees.
People need to be willing and able to investigate underlying programs. Kids have a broad idea of what they’re looking for. A lot of it still comes down to hard to quantify “squishy” aspects related to feel.
I disagree unless one is going to grad school. The opportunities or outcomes vary quite a bit by university. Top students excel but if few employers post for jobs on your campus or if the professors aren’t well connected in the field, your first job may be lacking.
We should strive for specificity, but there’s always the challenge of translating information the more complicated and nuanced that information becomes.
And some things that we think should be relatively straightforward aren’t that straightforward at all. An 18-year old working class African American may desire med school. What are the best institutions for this student to realize his/her dream? There are only about 100 black AAMC matriculants per year. And most of them aren’t working class/poor. There’s no easy answer to that narrowly defined question. The answer is someplace inexpensive with a track record of getting economically less privileged AA students through the pre-med requirements and med school application process…which is where?
For 2020/21 there were 7,126 black matriculants to med school (of 94,243 total matriculants, so 7.6%). This does not count mixed race students, some portion of which are likely black as well.
This can be difficult, but for high achieving URM students there are thousands of college access CBOs that are helping tens of thousands of students. Questbridge and Posse are two large organizations providing great opportunities to thousands of students, many of them URMs and/or low-SES.
I was about to say the same thing…the methodology has been public for quite a long time. IIRC, the Peer assessment Survey was the last black box and with a weight of 20% is still quite relevant.
Rankings are a general guideline. US News is one of the oldest, starting back in the 80s (when the entire weight was Peer Ranking); its a solid tool to understand general quality of schools. One critique I’ve had is how they introduced criteria that punished public schools and favored private schools; I’m not sure those criteria are a great indication of a better school.
For those who do not like US News Best Colleges ratings & rankings, I wish that they were available as a resource when I applied to college. At least US News has a verifiable basis for most of its ratings. Prior to the advent of US News Best Colleges reputation, rumor, & privilege ruled college admissions.
As I said, opportunities and outcomes are more dependent on the student than they are on the institution. This is not conjecture. It was shown initially by Dale and Krueger in 2001 and replicated and refined since.
As for who recruits on what campus, that’s random. It’s more related to regionality than the school per se. Big companies recruit at lots of schools. Some have pet schools, and they aren’t all the same. Smaller companies tend to recruit close to where they are. Of course there will be opportunities unique to every school. One can’t know in advance however which ones will be germane to them at the time they apply, because interests change over time.
I agree with you that there’s a need for more and better data. Universities themselves could do more, much more. Some of them, including UChicago and Columbia, don’t even publish annual CDS’s. I suspect one of the reasons they don’t is precisely because of the rankings (particularly USNWR rankings). CDS is a good starting point but it isn’t sufficient because it lacks granularities that help students make better decisions, consistences that make comparisons more meaningful, and (often) accuracies that can be relied upon to avoid being misled. We also do need some third parties to help validate the data.
There’s actually quite a bit of data in IPEDS. It’s just very arduous to search. Michelle Kartzschmer has created a spreadsheet of all the data that allows ranking of any of a bazillion items. If for example can find schools with 50% acceptance rate, fewer than 10% part time students, and more than 50 engineering courses, as a random example. It’s cheap and well worth it (DIY College Rankings). That combined with College Scorecard make a pretty compelling package.
The “lower ranked” college my daughter attends had tons of information on outcomes.
Graduation rate is lower than many “higher ranked” schools (80% graduate within 6 years vs. the high 90s many top ranked schools boast of). However, the biggest reason students don’t graduate ‘on time’ is due to finances - so a lower graduation rate that is still well above the national average didn’t bother us because our student doesn’t have financial stress - due to excellent merit aid and a ton of saving on our part.
Her ‘lower ranked’ school has a low student/teacher ratio 9:1, I believe. 98% of all teachers have a terminal degree in their field of instruction, meaning almost all have a PhD. There are no adjuncts or TAs teaching classes. Those teachers by and large received their degrees from ‘top ranked’ public and private schools in the US and abroad.
Career resource office has great internship placement, and also offers to subsidize students who received non-paid internship offers. Yes, the school’s endowment is only $450 million, as opposed to billions…but still seems pretty healthy. And they do use a lot on resources/financial aid rather than sports programs (Div III).
91% of students going on to grad school go to their #1 choice. All three of my daughter’s close friends who graduated this past year were fully-funded for grad school (McGill, Cornell, UChicago).
There are lots of ways to determine quality and outcome. As my daughter is (currently) interested in graduate programs, we definitely looked for schools that have strong placement in grad programs, not hard to find, even among ‘lower ranked’ schools. We probably would have chosen a set of different schools if she was interested in say, Investment Banking. And still a different set if she was interested in teaching. And yet a different set if she was interest in nursing.
It is a lot easier to determine quality if you are clear on what you value, and what you are looking for in an education - no matter what the individual school’s ranking is. It is harder if you are looking to ranking (prestige) to act as your heuristic. And potentially a lot more expensive.
I have found that Ithaca College is the most transparent of any college I’ve seen with regards to outcomes by major. Kenan-Flagler at UNC also does a fabulous job at reporting outcomes. Their report has 97% participation and conforms to The National Undergraduate Business Symposium First Destination Reporting Standards (NUBS Standards). Prospective students would be wise to see if their potential university conforms to such standards and what their participation rate is.
I was a solid high school grad and went to a large regional university for free. That college is currently ranked in the Top 200 nationally. Their career services office was quite lacking. I wanted to leave the area after graduation, but very few employers offered that opportunity. I majored in finance and asked about financial analyst programs at firms recruiting on campus. They were only hiring for sales positions. While I got an interview with a Big 4 consulting firm, I didn’t land an offer. I ended up working for the university in a low paying job that I thoroughly enjoyed. I later got into a top MBA program but what if I hadn’t done well enough in undergrad or on the GMAT?
Dale & Krueger’s analysis of College and Beyond institutions indicates that students who were more likely to attend the most selective school to which they were admitted had observable characteristics that are associated with higher earnings potential. The 2002 D&K study used the first College & Beyond data set of 27 colleges. Of those, only three institutions had SAT averages below the 95th percentile. Those were Morehouse, Penn State and Xavier Univ of Lou, two of which are HBCUs. The D&K study controls for students with parents with 16+ years of education but what if those parents are educators? What if only one parent works? Therefore, family income is important as well as parental education. D&K also conceded that Black and Hispanic students appear to benefit from attending more selective institutions. I presume due to financial aid but also university resources and exposure.
College and Beyond II: Outcomes of a Liberal Arts Education is currently updating
Data collection is currently ongoing. Data will be available for research use in 2022. This will be fascinating to see how students outcomes compare amongst these institutions:
I’m not familiar with the resources available to students researching colleges in the 1970s, but in more recent decades there have been countess resources to research and learn about colleges besides just looking at USNWR ranking. The key is to research how the college does it metrics that are important to a particular student, rather than focus on USNWR ranking or other college ranking that is based on criteria that has little to do with what is important to that student.
For example, an earlier post gave the example of an URM student who hopes to pursue med school. The USNWR ranking tells this student almost nothing about which college will best help meet this goal. It tells him/her almost nothing about his/her cost after FA + scholarships, pre-med advising, collaborative vs competitive atmosphere/grading, availability of desired majors, historical outcomes of similar students, availability of desired ECs and out of classroom activities, etc.
IPEDS/College Navigator does provide some useful data, but I’d argue that they aren’t sufficient. The data need to be more granular. For example, on admissions, students want to know what their chances of admissions are, not some aggregate pool of applicants. The same with retention and graduation rates. Another example is data specific to majors. Students need to know how likely they can get into a major and graduate with a degree on time in that major.
Too bad there isn’t a standard of providing success outcomes by major like Ithaca College does.
Once you’re equipped with that, it’s important to know what it takes to get into each major if there’s competitive admissions (e.g., engineering or business) after entry.
SMU provides success outcomes for medical school admissions. Prospective students surely want more info, like where grads matriculated, but this is a solid step.
I do applaud SMU for their efforts, but many schools share this type of data, which always raise more questions, of which the answers are highly germane to interpreting these data, such as:
-Does SMU give everyone who meets their criteria a committee letter? If not, how many are weeded out this way?
-Looks like this data also includes DO programs, as well as MD. What are the relative acceptance rates?
-How many of these students graduated from undergrad in 2019? Does this data include students who apply to MD or DO schools after attending a Post-Bacc program or SMP? What proportion worked for a few years post undergrad to get more patient facing experience? What are the relative acceptance rates of these various groups?
It certainly raises more questions. There are lots of things to consider. Do some others have more robust data on med/pre-health outcomes?
To make it more relevant to the topic at hand, one can look at outcomes while incorporating socioeconomic factors as well as race and do a ranking. Some, like Forbes (?), do a salary survey of grads after a few years. It’s one measure of outcome but also may be skewed by percentage reporting.
Common Data Sets and US News consider Pell Grant outcomes as well as all other outcomes. That’s a good start.
So, last night I tuned into the an episode of the NBC TV show “Capital One College Bowl.” Peyton Manning is one of the hosts. Three college students from various colleges compete by answering questions. The final 8 teams were, by seeding:
Ole Miss
Tennessee
Michigan
USC
UCLA
Alabama
Columbia
Auburn
Quarterfinal results:
Auburn (8) def. Ole Miss (1) 665-535
Columbia (7) def. Tennessee (2) 925-510
Alabama (6) def. Michigan (3) 860-540
USC (4) def. UCLA (5) 760-500
Last night Columbia barely beat Auburn in one semifinal. Not sure when USC vs. Alabama, the other semifinal will air. But this is how we should determine the academic rankings “empirically.” Have an academic contest between the best and brightest from each university.
I can’t believe Michigan didn’t send their smartest students to go against Bama. Must have been Michigan’s 2nd or 3rd stringers.
My suggestion is that each college should open 3 to 5 admissions spots for open market bidding. Colleges are then ranked based upon the amount of money raised through this auction. Here the market sets the value and the schools (at least some) can raise significant $, win/win.
