<p>Swarthmore gets punished in the US News rankings for the following factors:</p>
<p>6-year graduation rate: S 92%, W 96%, A 95%. Swarthmore’s graduation rate is commendably high, but it is lower than A or W. Why? Who knows, but among the three, S is the one with the “meatgrinder” reputation, a hard and demanding school that has many students on the brink of physical and mental exhaustion much of the time. Is that a good or a bad thing? You be the judge. Also note that S gets double-punished here because not only is its graduation rate slightly lower than A & W, but it is lower than its own “predicted graduation rate” (-2), a separate ranking category. W equals its “predicted graduation rate” and A is +1.</p>
<p>Faculty resources rank: S 12, W 2, A 17. Faculty compensation is the biggest component of this. AAUP faculty salary figures show quite comparable salaries at the three colleges at the full professor, associate professor, and assistant professor levels. But another factor that could affect a college’s score here is the age composition of the faculty. A school with a higher ratio of (more senior) full professors would have a higher average faculty compensation than a school with a younger faculty. There’s something to be said for each. An older faculty is more experienced; a younger faculty tends to be more energetic, and sometimes more attuned to current trends in their field and better able to connect to students. Basis for choosing a college? Not without knowing specifics.</p>
<p>Financial resources rank (spending per student): S 9, W 6, A 9. Smallish difference here, but W does spend slightly more per student than A or S. Ho-hum. </p>
<p>Alumni giving rank: S 14, W 2, A 4. OK, so a slightly smaller percentage of Swarthmore’s alums give to the college. What do we make of this? US News would have you believe it means S alums are less satisfied with their college experience, but an equally (or more?) plausible explanation is that A & W have somewhat more effective systems in place to promote alumni giving. Should that be the basis for choosing a college?</p>
<p>Bottom line, the differences in rankings are trivial, and once you delve into the statistical factors that account for the differences in rankings, they become even more trivial. Don’t obsess over such trivialities.</p>
<p>The USNews financial resources index actually counts tuition as factor through its reverse-image, financial aid. It took a while for the accounting community to catch on because it was usually thought that financial aid was already captured on the income side of the ledger simply as marked-down tuition. However, it is now common practice to label it as an expense. The result was the “high tuition-high financial aid” business model that we see now.</p>
<p>^^ Thanks, tk, I had never seen US News’ “efficiency” rating before (post #22). </p>
<p>It’s an odd metric, though. They rate efficiency in terms of expenditures per US News rating point, without regard to the total rating points achieved by the school. So among “national universities,” Florida State comes out as the most efficient, even though it’s only #91 in the overall ranking. Another question to ask is, which school gets the highest overall ranking while spending money efficiently? Among “national universities” that would appear to be William and Mary which gets all the way to #32 in the overall ranking while spending only slightly more per rating point than Florida State ($411.48 to $355.32 for FSU).</p>
<p>No big surprise, but 9 of the 10 “most efficient” national universities are publics. I suspect if you did this analysis for all colleges and universities, you’d generally find the publics more “efficient.” But this is exactly what they get punished for in the US News ranking, i.e., lower expenditures per student = lower “financial resources.” </p>
<p>But Bob Morse is only playing games with us here. He has the data readily available to produce an efficiency ranking for all colleges and universities, so we could see just how inefficient some of the big spenders are. But Morse knows where his bread is buttered; there’s no way he’s going to produce a ranking that’s going to put Ivies and other elite privates in a bad light, because he sells magazines by pandering to the parents and students who are the biggest fans of those high-cost and in some cases highly inefficient institutions.</p>
<p>Well, I find the label “financial resources” confusing. I assumed it was a measure of institutional wealth, like endowment per student. Come to find out, it really means “expenditures”. (RTFM!)</p>
<p>Is the metric itself misleading? Of course there is no guarantee that every additional million dollar expenditure buys an additional million dollars worth of high-quality academic resources. In a free market, at very well-run colleges, it may tend to be the case that more academic expenditures do buy more academic quality. In reality, the money could be going to overpaid professors who can’t teach or to poorly planned, unnecessary science centers. These costs may well be covered by higher tuitions. </p>
<p>On its face, this metric (high spending per student divided by ranking points) does seem to do a better job of identifying the “best” colleges than the one above (low spending per student divided by ranking points). That’s not to say there isn’t some third metric that would be better than either one at identifying true ROI (or value).</p>