<p>What is the best way to judge the quality of a college? I know that quality means different things to different people, and I think it is all relevant. At the moment I am thinking of the academic quality and long term outlook for the college.
Since so many of us are suddenly looking at colleges we may never have heard of, and we get 'warned' all the time here on CC not to put too much stock in rankings (and there are so many different rankings!), How does one judge the quality of a college?
There are a few colleges that we've looked into that we had never heard of, or had never paid any attention to before this search. How do we know that the college 3 states away is actually any better than the one that is nearby?<br>
Many are looking for schools where their stats put them in that top quartile for possible merit aid, but those same schools are the ones that we may know the least about, simply because they tend to be smaller and less well known. </p>
<p>Just my thoughts</p>
<ol>
<li>Ability to pay</li>
<li>Availability of major </li>
<li>Accessibility of faculty</li>
<li>Fit</li>
<li>Placement (both grad school and business)</li>
<li>Strength of faculty (not as good a metric as accessibility, but a school with good researchers tends to have more funding across the board)</li>
<li>Prestige (should still be considered, though not as much as some people think)</li>
<li>Other factors that are individual-dependent (may vary; a disabled student may consider accessibility of campus over anything else, for example)</li>
</ol>
<p>This is a generalist take–other factors will tend to eat up the conversation, as will fit, but this combination probably holds everything relevant.</p>
<p>College is an investment. Is it fiscally sound should be your first consideration. Remember the housing bubble, now it is the student loan bubble. Will your college keep the lights and water on? Imagine paying tens of thousands if not a hundred thousand of dollars only to have your school close its doors in the third year? Do you want to compete all over again for a seat at a new institution. Your favorite professors will bail when they are solicited for jobs at sound institutions. Services and amenities will disappear. It will be a nightmare to get professor recommendations, transcripts, and what if you were due to graduate, how would you feel about an extra semester or two elsewhere? Or, how about paying premium dollar to a premium brand institution only to have the state bail out your student.</p>
<p><a href=“Mark Cuban Student Loan Bubble”>Mark Cuban Student Loan Bubble;
<p>As you mention there are a thousand middle brand colleges that Forbes, Fortune, and USNews have IMHO not effectively sought due diligence reporting on their fiscal soundness. Be forewarned by the fiasco of rating agencies Moodys, S&P and Fitch during the collapse mortgage derivatives which they rated Aaa or AAA.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the most important qualities are not easily directly measured (how much do students learn? Can the professors teach? Etc.), so we are generally stuck with proxy measures. </p>
<p>Some proxy measures I would consider for your interest would be percentage faculty that are full time, percentage faculty that have terminal degree in their field, class size distribution, and admit rates to graduate and professional school (the latter being unfortunately not always available/published).</p>
<p>I think all too often schools are unfairly judged based on incoming student stats. While I believe there is <em>some</em> merit to judging college quality based on incoming stats, I think it’s also important to realize that colleges generally have little to no control over this. I think a fairer and more accurate way to judge quality is by looking at program curriculum (rigor, and appropriateness of classes required), breadth of classes available overall (more options for electives), overall fit, facilities/services available to students (including how well campus is maintained/updated), percentage of faculty with Phds, student/faculty ratio, and campus safety.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, a lot of great schools end up getting stuck in a rankings rut, since the current ranking system is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s like ranking tenure. Top performing students almost always pick top ranked schools… and rankings are highly influenced by student stats, so top schools stay at the top, leaving lower ranked schools virtually powerless to move up. It’s actually a pretty corrupt system if you think about it.</p>
<p>The great American universities are all just that, and every student who wants a world-class education will receive one at any of them, in almost any field. People will debate over which is “best,” and an entire cottage industry has evolved from those branding efforts. No college can guarantee that your child won’t fail or withdraw mid-semester following a disastrous break-up. Some might offer a more nurturing support network, but that is usually a consequence of individual, not institutional, efforts. Smaller undergraduate colleges are less likely to have graduate students grading papers or leading sections of required classes, but they can’t guarantee that your child will get a “rock-star” professor, either. </p>
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<p>This is very true. It is extremely difficult to judge what happens to the students coming OUT of a school. We would be a lot better off if we could get some focus on those stats and some common information across schools. But I think that is not in the interest of most colleges to shift the focus to that end of the process.</p>
<p>If you don’t trust the rankings, a simple way to assess colleges according to your own admission eligibility is to look at average test scores (<a href=“Top 500 Ranked Colleges - Highest SAT 75th Percentile Scores”>USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings). Find colleges whose 75th percentile scores make them realistic match or reach schools (assuming your own scores are reasonably in line with your other qualifications). Then identify the ones that best match your budget, major interests, desired location, preferred size, etc. Finally, drill down to some of the quality factors mentioned above (although you may need to investigate how exactly to measure something like “strength of faculty”).</p>
<p>Comparing average test scores is convenient, but is it a good way to assess quality? I think it is good enough for a first pass. An average test score is a crude market indicator of how appealing a college is to the best students (who, after all, have the greatest freedom of choice). The higher a school’s average test scores, the greater the likelihood that the average student chose it over many others where they could have been accepted. </p>
<p>If a college were a hidden gem, it probably wouldn’t stay hidden forever. More and more students would apply; the college would admit the most qualified applicants; the average scores would go up. That’s how supply and demand works. Of course, markets sometimes are not perfect; the “pricing” mechanisms are subject to distortions. Likewise, test scores are imperfect indicators. Nevertheless you need some such indicator(s) to constrain your search … unless you just plan to attend an affordable college fairly close to home that offers the major you want. That’s exactly what most college students do.</p>
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<p>A few such measurements are available. Payscale.com tracks average alumni salaries of many schools (although it is self-reported data and deliberately excludes the salaries of alumni who earn advanced degrees.)
The National Science Foundation (at webcaspar.com) tracks the number of alumni who earn doctorates in many fields (although it does not adjust these numbers for institution size or program size, and it does not tell you how many doctorates are earned in top programs.)</p>
<p>The Forbes college rankings are largely based on “outcomes” data. To a large extent, it identifies the same set of top colleges as US News does (though not necessarily in exactly the same order).</p>
<p>One of the biggest problems with “outcomes” data is that it is so hard to tease out how much they reflect selection effects v. treatment effects. Maybe schools that whose alumni earn the most money or the most doctorates are simply cherry-picking the best students, who would have done just as well after attending different schools.</p>
<p>With increasing numbers of colleges (especially smaller ones) going test-optional, the test scores can be deceptive. Test-optional colleges will only show the scores from students who chose to submit them - the highest performers, presumably. That’s why Bowdoin posts such high scores: the lower percentiles simply aren’t included.</p>
<p>I also warn people against investing too much in the aggregate stats posted by large universities. They don’t separate the ultra-selective STEM schools from the non-selective divisions, or the arts schools where test scores are barely considered (but are at least as selective as academic faculties, based on auditions and portfolio reviews). </p>
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<p>If you are willing to assume high school students are wise and informed evaluators of quality. </p>
<p>Do you think the books favored by high school students are the best quality, best written, most edifying books? Do you think the music favored by high school students is the best composed, most accomplished music? Do you think the foods favored by high school students are the best quality, healthiest, most nutritious foods? Do you think the clothes favored by high school students are the most durable, high quality clothes available? Do you believe in the tooth fairy as well?</p>
<p>Good reply by @BobWallace.</p>
<p>18 year-olds have a penchance to be swayed by stuff like the success of a football/basketball team or how awesome the dorms and amenities are that have nothing to do with improving them as individuals in the 4 years that they are there.</p>
<p>To the OP: it’s probably best to just name the colleges rather than speak in generalities. Then you get the wisdom of the crowd and you can judge for yourself from people’s responses how worthwhile the responses are.</p>
<p>^^^ As I wrote above, markets are subject to distortions. Misinformation and fads exist. Irrational factors can affect purchasing decisions. That does not necessarily mean they do in every case or that they have lasting effects. I think some deference is owed to the collective judgements of top students ( as well as their families and their advisors). You don’t have to believe in the individual wisdom of high school students to believe in the collective wisdom of college markets over time. </p>
<p>Besides, what is the evidence that colleges with the highest average scores do not in fact tend to be among the highest quality colleges? Many other measurements point to approximately the same set of colleges:
- average class sizes
- average faculty salaries
- average alumni earnings
- alumni PhDs per capita
- proportional representation of alumni in national/corporate leadership positions
- endowment per student
- faculty and student awards (Fulbrights, Rhodes, Nobels, etc.)
- average percentage of determined need covered by financial aid
- 4 and 6 year graduation rates</p>
<p>You can disagree that any of the above are good quality indicators.
Let’s say they all come down to the richest most prestigious colleges having unfair advantages in cherry-picking top students and providing them with good facilities, without necessarily educating them better than other colleges. What then are better indicators that all the ranking systems are missing and that point to a completely different set of top schools? Why wouldn’t the richest colleges invest in changes needed to improve performance as measured by those indicators? </p>
<p>If you only mean that these measurements overstate the quality differences among schools, and therefore lead many high-scoring students to choose overpriced colleges, that might be a valid point (except that the net price they actually pay is in many cases lower than the competition’s).</p>
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<p>Utter hogwash. Efficient markets are efficient for good reasons. The financial markets are extremely data driven and based on experts who hone their analytical skills over decades, they are efficient because bad investors are driven from the market because their capital is destroyed, they are efficient because results are measurable and available, they are efficient because of countless iterations of purchasing and selling and evaluating. Your argument would suggest that financial markets should exhibit the same efficient behavior if all purchasing decisions were made by 18 year olds just finishing high school who got to pick one stock and hold it for the rest of their lives. </p>
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<p>No, it doesn’t work that way - you don’t get to shift the burden of proof to me because you made a ridiculous and completely unsupportable argument about market efficiency.</p>
<p>But naturally your agenda is just to ensure that the super-elite colleges you adore remain ensconced on their pedestal of ultimate superiority. I have no interest in toppling your darlings, I was responding to your absurd notion that there cannot possibly be any hidden gems of quality undergraduate education because teenagers display perfect wisdom in their colleges choices.</p>
<p>You could ask the department head of your intended major how they evaluate their professors’ and instructors’ TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS (were learning objectives met<em>). Of course, you can’t get data, but learning what the school SAYS it values and then checking that against what folks say they have experienced might give some insight. I’d love to know more about this, if anyone shopping for schools has ever tried it. (</em>Though, how does not decide if the learning objectives states are the “right” ones?) </p>
<p>@tk21769:</p>
<p>If you go by per capita PhD production and per capita student awards, you’ll find a bunch of LACs that you normally don’t think of as top tier doing as well as the top elite research universities.</p>
<p>And if you go by alumni in top leadership positions in business & politics, the top state flagships actually show very well compared to some elite privates that, on average, take in students with far better stats.</p>
<p>For instance, if you look at the “American Leaders” category in Forbes’ ranking, Cal, UMich, Wisconsin, UT-Austin, UCLA, UVa, UNC, Illinois, and Indiana actually produce more leaders in American society PER CAPITA than JHU, Rice, CMU, WashU, or Vanderbilt. </p>
<p>That’s stunning considering the average quality of students entering the first group of schools and the average quality of students entering the second group of schools.</p>
<p>Oh, and those top publics produce more leaders per capita than Wake or BC as well, if you’re wondering (Forbes did not rank Emory because they lied). </p>
<p>Cal, in fact, would be firmly in the middle of the Ivies when measured by per capita production of “American leaders” (unsurprisingly, Swarthmore, Williams, and Amherst are within the Ivy range as well).</p>
<p>At the risk of repeating myself, but not on this thread, I’ll quote one of my favorite bits of wisdom - “The race is not always to the strongest or the swiftest, but that’s the way to bet.”</p>
<p>Choosing a college is a bit like placing a bet, only the horse gets to choose whether or not to accept your bet. Absent some hidden bit of info you have managed to obtain, the existing rankings are just fine to work with, assuming you don’t get too caught up in them and pick colleges ill-suited for you. </p>
<p>You get one shot at this, and to go outside the lines is most likely a fool’s errand. Directional State is almost never going to be a better choice than Harvard unless you can’t afford Harvard or they won’t let you in. For many students, Directional State is the best choice given their financial circumstances and admissions packets, but if you could go to either, Harvard is almost always the smart bet.</p>
<p>There is no need to reinvent the wheel here - use the rankings wisely and on average you will do well. Treat any school within 20 ranks of one another as basically equivalent - go to the cheapest one or the one you like the best, higher ranks matters little at that point. Swarthmore vs. UT-Dallas, there’s no contest who the “better” school is - unless you can’t stand the politics of Swarthmore or UT-Dallas is offering you a full ride - then it get’s more complicated. Swarthmore still offers a better education, but maybe circumstances (or major) dictate you go to UT-Dallas because it’s the better school for you. It really isn’t more complicated than that - although that’s still plenty complicated.</p>