While in general I think this is a useful tool I’d also like to see the methodology used. I looked at the data for my child’s school and I was surprised to see that the site listed my child’s school as charging twice as much ($14,332) for students whose families earn $0-30,000 as for those in the $30,001-48,000 bracket ($7,196), and more than those in the $48,001-75,000 bracket ($13,949). Obviously this is not accurate.
While this is not a fatal flaw it does make me question the accuracy of the site’s other numbers.
a little aside: Your mention of the service programs reminded me of a comment I made to my Congressional Rep…these same kids who are giving to our communities through these service programs (AmeriCorps the particular program I have some familiarity with) can not use that ‘income’ (it’s not much, but they get a living stipend) to start an IRA. The VERY ‘kids’ who are dedicated to that type of service, and likely to have relatively lower life-time earnings than many of their peers, and so will need the retirement security that IRA-investments can be an important part of…yet they are kept from starting those accounts because of the federal rule. Again…talk about mixed messages.
For example, he said,
“The return is unequal in other ways. There is an earnings gender gap at every top university. The size of the difference varies a great deal. At Duke, for example, women earned $93,100 per year on average, compared with $123,000 for men, a difference of $29,900. At Princeton, men earned more and women earned less, for a difference of $47,700. Women who enrolled at Cornell earned more than women who enrolled at Yale.”
When I go to https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/, all I see is Duke’s average salary is $76,700, with no breakdown between male and female grads. Does anyone know how he could’ve gotten this data out of this website?
As far as the website itself, I think the data would be a lot more meaningful if the graduation rate and income data are tied to majors, e.g. what % of students who majored in engineering graduated in 4 years, and what is their median earning 10 years out. As others pointed out it would also be more accurate if the median salary is for all graduates not just those with federal loans. At a school like Harvard, only 3% of students received federal loans, how can you accurately assess median income of all graduates based on those 3% of students? Even at a state school like Univ. of Washington, it’s only 33%.
It would be nice to have transfer in/out rates.
It would be good to give 4 year graduation rate as opposed to or in addition to 6 year as these are “4 year universities”. The 4 year rate is much more indicative of how good a school is, as it shows the academic preparedness of the general student population, as well as ease of getting into classes.
The search by school name requires that you enter exact name of the school, e.g. if you misspell Massachusetts your search will come up empty. It also doesn’t know common shortened names such MIT, NYU, UCLA, Caltech etc. Perhaps a better parser could be used to parse the strings and return better search results like on Google search.
If feasible, I agree that would be ideal. But I suppose that would need colleges’ cooperation in providing the names and identification (SSN?) to the government so they can match the graduates with their tax records? Would colleges and the public be OK with that?
As for the request on “breaking down by majors”, since in LACs and other non pre-professional colleges one can hardly predict what industry/field a student is working in just by looking at their major, and the industry/field is the main determining factor of earning. Then within an industry, what type of work one is doing (ranging from deal maker of a firm to IT support) makes a big difference too. I can see how all this will be accurately captured in such a tool is a big challenge.
Not that I think the site should, but I wish there were options for international students, too. For example, what schools do give merit/need based financial aid, and what schools are need aware or not, etc.
@tedmitchell thank you for posting for feedback–I applaud you for reaching out to learn about what users think of your new tool! We need to break this ridiculous reliance on US News rankings as a basis for picking a college–would love to see something replace it that helps families make the best financial and personal fit decision with regard to college.
As a parent of two college students and a 20+ year technology executive --my feedback is that this is a solid start as most web services are in the beginning – the real power today is in personalization of tools like this. I encourage you and your team to figure out how this tool can be personalized to each family/student— income, major, in state/out of state tuition, average loan amount for income level, career location perhaps – requires multiple data sources. Example payscale has good career earnings data by major and university which could be incorporated. You are missing alot of private loan data which could change the results. This is how google and other companies create great services — personalized, simple to use and real time access to multiple data sources to create the most relevant information service. Good start.
I could not disagree with this more. This was abandoned a long time ago for a variety of very valid reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the school. For example, many students take leaves of absences for any number of personal reasons. And before you say that could be accounted for and only count the time they are on campus, that is an extraordinary amount of extra work and subject to a lot of error. Also, schools often discipline students with suspension for a semester or a year for major violations. Do we want them to stop doing that because they are afraid of what it will do to their 4 year rate? Additionally, more and more schools are offering 5 year degrees that include a masters, but it is a single program. And then there are the schools that have robust co-op programs that can add time. These last two examples would be penalized for offering progressive and interesting programs that appeal to some percentage of the population.
In short, the 4 year rate used to be cited a lot more often and for these and other reasons, it was rightly stopped being cited as the main standard. You can still find the stat for most schools, but it has a lot more flaws than the 6 year rate. Just as an anecdote, so not typical but does show how many ways for the stat to be flawed as a measure of the university, my D received a 4 year (8 semester at her school) full tuition scholarship. But she received a full scholarship from the Chinese government to study in Beijing her 3rd year, so she took a leave of absence to preserve her original scholarship. So to Tulane it took her 5 years to graduate, when she actually had the credits, etc. to graduate after 3 years if she had wanted to. But hey, who can blame a kid for staying longer when it is mostly paid for? Should she have counted against their 4 year rate? Should they have tried to force her out the door?
I think of lot of these arguments pro and con the median incomes of graduates ten years out of college are familiar to those who championed the Forbes magazine college rankings as an alternative to USNews. The rap against using Payscale as a proxy for such income data was 1) it was self-selecting 2) it was too small a sample and, 3) favored colleges with large numbers of STEM majors. The last objection remains, but, I’m happy that the government seems to have overcome the first two objections.
Whether limiting the pool to alumni who graduated with an outstanding federally guaranteed student loan somehow skews the results for Harvard and other colleges with no-loan financial aid policies, I think the vast majority of people are willing to live with that level of margin of error.
Except that we don’t even know what the margin of error that results from that shortcut—and my quantitative social-scientist self, for one, is completely unwilling to live with that.
the share button next to results… it sends you to microsoft outlook… which to be honest seems a little outdated lol. usually when i see “share” i expect the twitter/facebook/gmail icons.
@TedMitchell - thank you so much for what you are doing. Over time this will become an invaluable resource to measure and compare colleges. Thank you for coming here to discuss the new site and there are some good people here that can be a sounding board for you. Keep up the good work!
@TedMitchell - I know y’all mean well, but just a sampling of the responses so far should point out the major, fatal flaw in this endeavor. There are simply too many ways to slice the onion. What one family sees as important, another will see as useless or even misleading. The government is unable to make this all things to all people, which means it will always simply be a reflection of the biases of the individuals who happen to be in office at a particular time.
Rather than try to have the government perform a role that is already being done by a number of private organizations, perhaps you could focus on a few more important points. Another poster pointed out that colleges across the spectrum tend to show loans as financial aid. This is very misleading and should be disclosed properly with warnings such as those on cigarette packages.
I do applaud you for reaching out to the parents and student here. It may have been a good idea to do so prior to rolling anything out…just sayin’.
The states in the location pulldown are not in alphabetical order. A breakdown of data by gender would be very useful. Otherwise I really like the website.
I’m a NYS resident, @TedMitchell, so I used the tool to compare our state schools. I was happily surprised to see our community colleges represented. I think cc’s get a bad rap and too little attention is paid to them. We have so many schools in NYS that it’s helpful to be able to compare them all in one place. It’s especially helpful to me because, as a homeschooler, I don’t have a guidance counselor to suggest schools or discuss our various options.
I do wish all schools were searchable by both the full name and common name. Anyone searching for “SUNY” schools won’t get the New Paltz campus because SUNY isn’t part of the name. I imagine a search for CUNY schools probably misses some branches too. RIT, NYU, and RPI are nowhere to be found.
I liked the link to the Net Price Calculators, but agree that colleges should be required to keep them up-to-date. I also agree with CollegeDadofTwo that colleges shouldn’t be able to refer to PLUS type loans as “financial aid.” In my opinion, those loans shouldn’t be in the calculators or in the financial aid package from the school at all. The gap between a school’s cost of attendance and grants + the federal student loan should be glaringly obvious. Unfortunately, in too many cases it isn’t. One of the packages my son received built loans into his aid package to reduce the ~$25k COA to our ~$5k EFC. However, included in that $20k of “aid” were the federal student loan, a $3k grant, and PLUS loans, so there was a $17k gap after our EFC. Yet the way the award letter was written, with the $5k out-of-pocket total on the bottom, it wasn’t immediately clear that the yearly cost to us was $22k, not $5k. That’s a huge difference. And the words “award” and “loan” should never be used in the same sentence.
I think the tool is a good start and I appreciate the effort. If you could tinker with the name/definition of EFC while you’re at it, that would be really helpful. It’s not an estimated contribution at all, but a number that qualifies students for a federal Pell grant. I wish the name was changed to reflect that.
I get that there are limitations to the data. But that’s no reason to publish a study done on a biased sample. It’s misleading. IMO, it is worse than not leading.
Do earnings incude graduates from professional schools, law, medical, business? If so, it would furtgher skew the outcome.
@porcupine98 - Little off topic here, but the 6 year problem is one that has vexed the University of Georgia for what seems like forever, and it got exacerbated when they switched for quarters to semesters (too many students could not grasp that a full load was now 5 classes, and the number of sections of a class over an academic year was reduced). To help “fix” the problem and nudge students along, the University System of Georgia Board of Regents implemented fixed rate tuition, i.e., you pay the same amount for 6 credit hours as you do for 15, at UGA, Georgia Tech, and one or two more of the system schools. Unfortunately, this only “nudges” those who do not have the full tuition Zell Miller scholarship who have not yet completed 127 hours because that scholarship pays based on credit hours enrolled on a per credit hour basis,
College is an investment of taxpayer funds plus expenditures from the students.
I think it is great to measure outputs to determine ROI.
Isn’t that more relevant than how many applicants they secured through student marketing or donations via alumni marketing? Or peer review via peer marketing?
Yes, but implied in that statement is that the “return” part of return on investment can be solely measured in dollar terms, and that those dollars are completely reflected in salaries after some period following graduation. And that’s the rub. For a typical business, dollars measure returns very well, although even then there are some nuances that have to be accounted for.
This is college. They are not trade schools. The idea is not simply to train people for the highest paying jobs available today. If that is the mentality, then we might as well prepare now for the movement to stop offering any major that doesn’t outperform the average. OMG, what a dangerous road that is. Not to mention, again, that the government itself does not appear to agree with this definition of ROI. Did you know that the government, and in fact this very Department of Education, sponsors full ride scholarships called FLAS that pay for hundreds if not thousands of students a year that have expertise in critical languages? (Full disclosure, although probably not required here, is that my son went through nearly all of law school on a FLAS and my daughter received a FLAS last year for her masters at Stanford). Now they don’t actually require those people to work for the government when they are finished, unlike most other similar scholarships. But when they do, those people don’t make a fortune, but instead often start out in lower level jobs. They are decent, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t pay like engineers or doctors or many other jobs. The point being, that combined with what I outlined earlier about joining programs like Teach for America and several others that the government has pushed hard, it is obvious that salary dollars in fact don’t measure ROI when it comes to the payoff on an education, either from the governments point of view (except for this scorecard) or from the point of view of a whole lot of people that value their college education greatly, but not because it leads to having a top 10% income.
College education should lead to a fulfilling life. Certainly part of that for most people is being positioned to earn enough money that they can be comfortable, that last term being extremely subjective and personal. But it is only one element of the equation, and we should never lose sight of that. That is the problem with these scorecards, ranking systems, and similar devices. They try to take something as complex as college, much less far more nebulous yet critical values such as life and happiness, and reduce them to something simplistic and in this case materialistic. I think we should all be very uncomfortable with that, but of course that is JMHO.