…but different (Cyrillic) alphabet. What looks to you like “CCCP” is really “SSSR” in our alphabet.
So, FWIW, CCCP neither abbreviates Communistic, nor Party, but rather:
Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik
(now, at least something was learned from that WSJ ranking 
)
So that would be, in college terms… Stanford, Swarthmore, Smith, Reed
I’m looking at it as a way to goose the rankings - even just a few kids can make it so they slide spots.
I’m being tongue in cheek - I don’t want to see schools go from 100+ majors to 20.
But when you see Babson and RHIT at the top - from two different sides of the professional world - from a pure WSJ ranking POV, if enhancing was your goal, it would make sense.
That is indeed a large part of the problem - GIGO. The theory is indeed, legit, albeit simplistic.
You’re right. However, there are very few students in “elite” colleges who are not both receiving federal loan and Pell grant recipients. For most colleges with acceptance rates that are lower than 30%, the number are still round 15%-20%.
When the differences that determine rankings are less than 1% of the total rank, 20% has a huge weight.
Looking at the methodology that you found on GoLocalProv, the entire salary impact looks even more problematic:
A. The title says that they are comparing it to “similar colleges”, yet the methodology only mentions the students’ demographics as being used.
B. See above for the bias inherent in taking data from colleges which select students whose academics predict a much higher salary than the average for their demographic
C. They further bias it towards colleges that accept students whose profiles are already demonstrating high earning potential by once again adding the raw median salaries of graduates. Moreover, they also bias the scores in favor of colleges who select Federal Aid recipients from the upper incomes percentiles of this group.
So, first, a college which only accepts poor students with 4.0 GPAs gets a boost from the fact that these do better than all poor students who attend a college, and then gets a second boost because the absolute salaries are higher.
Second, C provides a bonus for colleges who select Federal Aid recipients from the upper incomes percentiles of this group.
One of the most important demographics for predicting the salary of a college graduate is family income.
The range of student family incomes for receiving federal aid is from 0 to 40th percentile by income. This is a family income range of $0-$50,000.
Imagine two colleges, once which accepts mostly students from the upper income levels of Federal aid recipients, and also has higher median salary for graduates, and the other which accepts mostly poorer students, and has lower median salaries for graduates
So College A:
Predicted future income of students, on Federal aid, based on family income: $45,000
Median income of graduates: $125,000
College B:
Predicted future income of students, on Federal aid, based on family income: $25,000
Median income of graduates: $110,000
Initially:
College A difference: $80,000
College B difference: $85,000
College B ranks higher.
However, adding the trick used by WSJ:
College A: $80,000 + $120,000 = $200,000
College B: $85,000 + $110,000 = $195,000
Now college A ranks higher.
By adding the raw salaries, they have just “awarded” College A for not accepting the poorest students who are on Federal aid. Even though College B does a better job as helping low income students, College A will get the higher score, on “salary impact”.
I’m using dollars for the estimate, but replacing them with ranked score would have a similar effect.
I’ll just note I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with some colleges specializing.
Indeed, in a way the WSJ is offering a “making more bank than expected” specialty ranking. Viewed in that way, I don’t see it as much different from The Hollywood Reporter providing a ranking of film schools where AFI is way up high:
I do think kids should be careful about choosing a specialty school if they are not sure what they want to do (or might not be sure, a complicated state of being that I think nonetheless describes a lot of kids at this point).
But I think it is great for AFI, Rose-Hulman, Babson, and so on to exist, because for some kids I am sure they are great.
Like many other college rankings, it seems to expect arbitrarily selected weights of arbitrarily selected stats plugged in to a formula to have a meaningful output. However, this ranking seems more useless than most because the inputs are more useless than most, the underlying stats are less clear, and the paywall makes things more awkward.
For example, the first component seems to salary impact vs similar colleges, and “similar” is based on " demographic profile" of the college. The colleges I see with the highest value added to salary are as follows. There is a clear pattern that all of these colleges have a disproportionately large portion of students going in to fields associated with a higher salary, such as tech or business; and are selective enough to have higher achieving students. The calculation seems to assume that the college name + demographics drives salary rather than things like major/career field or individual student variables, such as being a high achieving student
MIT – $94k
Penn – $85k
CMU – $83k
Babson – $82k
Harvey Mudd — Does not exist?
The next component is how long to get a positive ROI from the college cost. It compares how much the college name adds to your salary, as listed above, to your net cost. It assumes your cost to attend the college is as follows, which appears to be average net cost for persons receiving Pell grants. MIT is indeed a good value, if your net cost is $5k/year, but few students pay that price. Instead, many students pay the full sticker price of $83k/year. The vast majority pay far more than the $5k/year used in the ranking To properly compare cost to attend of different colleges, you need to consider your actual cost to attend, not use such rankings of cost to attend.
MIT – Costs $5k/year
Penn – Costs $15k/year
CMU – Costs $38k/year
Babson – Costs $31k/year
Harvey Mudd — Does not exist?
The next factor is how graduation rate compares to “similar” colleges. Again similar seems to mean similar “demographic profile”. The colleges that do best on this metric seem to be as follows. It’s not clear how they are adjusting root graduation rate according to demographic profile, but the end result seems to be highly selective colleges that admit students who are likely to graduate do well in the graduation rate metric. And colleges that admit students who may face more challenges do worse.
Princeton – 99
Columbia – 98
Harvard – 98
Amherst – 97
Penn – 97
Yale – 97
I could continue. The end result is highly selective colleges that have a large portion of students pursuing higher earning fields of employment tend to do well in this ranking. However, highly selective colleges that do not have as large a portion of students pursuing tech/finance may be ranked lower than USNWR. Examples of the latter include:
Johns Hopkins – Ranked #99
Wellesley – Ranked #117
Middlebury – Ranked #131
Carleton – Ranked #218
Smith – Ranked #312
Good summary,
Any thoughts on why CalTech did not do particularly well, given that it is highly selective and has a large portion of ttudents pursuing higher earning fields?
And I see that Middlebury is among your examples of highly selective colleges that do not have as large a portion of students pursuing tech/finance, but I thought Midd did have a large portion of students pursuing finance - at least relative to Swarthmore (which did well in the WSJ ranking) and perhaps relative to Amherst (which is in your list of colleges that do have a large portion of students pursuing tech/finance).
Caltech was ranked #18, which is not bad. They were probably top ~10 for value added to salary, but well below MIT, Babson, and the like. One contributing factor is the lack of diversity at Caltech. As noted the expectations are based on “demographic profile,” Caltech has extremely few URM compared to MIT and others, so their formula may have higher expectations for Caltech than MIT/Babson.
There are factors that are considered beyond the ones listed. Amherst did poorly in the salary stat, compared to the other high ranked colleges. Amherst had the lowest salary listed among the highly ranked colleges in the table that displays with the WSJ article. Instead Amherst does well in other factors, such as the graduation rate, as I noted above. I expect Amherst does better in the “demographic profile” category than Middlebury (Amherst has much higher URM %), so the formula may have higher expectations for Middlebury than Amherst, contributing to the different outputs. The specific numbers were as follows.
Value Added to Salary: Amherst = $52k, Middlebury = $41k
Cost to Attend: Amherst = $17k, Middlebury = $29k
Graduation Rate: Amherst = 97, Middlebury = 90
The problem with combining this metric with the median income, is that both of these colleges are full-need-met, so the students for whom there is data on income are all paying $0 or very little…
This is also no more than another way of presenting the “financial diversity” data. The average cost of all full need met colleges is linearly correlated to the number of students who are eligible for Federal aid, since almost all such students receive financial aid from the college.
Yes, but not exactly “opening doors”, at least not directly, since this is related to connections and a grad student usually does not have them yet. However, it is often easier for an undergrad to approach their TA than to approach the faculty member directly. Your TA can then introduce you to the faculty member, which can be better than simply approaching the professor, if the TA also has said some complimentary things about you to the professor. So grad students can help in opening that very important first door.
The cost to attend is not based on median income. That would require using NPCs and be time consuming. Instead it is the average cost to attend for persons who receive federal financial aid – both Pell grants and federal loans. Only persons receiving federal aid are included in the listed average cost. For example, College Scorecard lists the following average costs for federal FA recipients. This matches the numbers in the WSJ listings exactly
Amherst – $17k cost (22% Pell, 10% fed loans), ($5k for $30 to $48k income, $18k for $75k to $110k income)
Middlebury – $29k cost (18% Pell, 23% fed loans), ($9k for $30 to $48k income, $21k for $75k to $110k income)
This metric seems to favor colleges that provide high enough grant aid such that students do not need to take out federal loans and/or provide their own loan aid, so few students other than relatively lower income Pell grants students remain in the cost calculations. Note that lower cost Amherst has a far better Pell/loan ratio than Middlebury.
This average cost for federal aid recipients is not particularly relevant to how much the school costs for a student reading the rankings, or even the average student’s cost.
I’m confused. How did Amherst rank #10, while UChicago ranked #37, Cal Berkeley # 51 and JHU #99, even though their graduation rate and salaries are similar. In fact, Amhersts is actually slightly lower on graduation rate and salary.
And this is just one example of a shocking ranking. There are a few worse than this (FIU, La Verne, etc)
These rankings are so misleading. To give “scores” based on similar colleges, yet an overall ranking using those “adjusted” scores, gives a false and confusing list.
FIU doesn’t like your post!! 
Please note that Amherst placed 8th in the ranking.
Why do so few people drive Teslas?
Note that the WSJ ranking formula is not using raw salary or raw graduation rate Instead it uses value added to salary by the college name, which is based on reported salary for federal FA recipients compared to demographic expectations. Like salary, they are also adjusting graduation rate for demographic expectations. Specific numbers for the 4 schools you listed are below:
Among the 4 schools, Chicago’s federal financial aid cost is listed as highest and salary boost is lowest, resulting in by the worst ROI. The relatively high cost for fed FA recipients at Chicago surprised me. The bulk of Chicago’s federal financial aid recipients are listed something other than both Pell grants recipients and federal loan recipients. I’m not sure what this category is, but it includes ~20% of students at Chicago. This group of non-Pell/non-loan federal FA recipients seems to primarily have high income, which pulls up the average cost compares to peers. Some specific numbers are below. Chicago has a low listed cost for the <$110k income category, but most federal FA recipients apparently have >$110k income at Chicago.
Among the listed 4 schools, Berkeley seems to do the best in the combination salary boost, fed FA cost, and adjusted graduation rate; which makes up 70% of rankings. Berkeley’s weak point seems to be the learning environment surveys, which make up 20% of rankings.
Johns Hopkins scored as well as Berkeley in salary boost and cost, but JHU did poorly in adjusted graduation rate, with a score of only 82, well below all others on this list. It’s not clear to me why JHU does so poorly compared to peers in this metric. For example Vanderbilt and JHU have a near identical raw graduation rate. JHU has a higher % URM, so I’d expect the adjustment to have lower expectations for JHU, yet JHU scores notably lower. Maybe they are using a different sample group such as only federal FA recipients, and/or are using something other than 6-year graduation rate prior to adjustment. This is consistent with Amherst scoring so highly in adjusted graduation rate, in spite of having a lower raw graduation rate than other JHU/Vanderbilt (in the sample year I selected). WSJ doesn’t provide adequate detail about how they are computing the stat, so there is no way to know.
I’m curious for anyone who has a subscription - how do the regional comprehensive university’s do - the Truman State, College of New Jersey, UNC-Asheville, Salisbury U., Christopher Newport type schools?
Not sure if the top 50 were shown - but if not, here you go - click on story continues.
Ranking: Wall Street Journal’s 2024 Best Colleges In America (yahoo.com)
I think a topic like this would normally have 1000’s of posts in the thread. the fact that it’s only like 200 tells you just how silly most people think this particular ranking is.
hmmm - you can say that about all rankings - even the vaunted US News that most kids and you used.
If you’re daughter is happy - whether at UGA where she is - or Kansas or Ramapo - then what else really matters?
100% agree… but it doesn’t change the fact that this “secondary” ranking gets fewer comments than USNews or others. I think it’s likely because there is nobody here defending Lake Forest College or the University of La Verne, and the people at U Chicago, Colby, Pomona, and others (just picking at random) can reject the results as pointless when ranked lower than those schools.
Most people would argue rankings are kinda pointless. “Find your fit”…right? When earnings become a significant factor, they (IMO) lose just about all credibility. Post-graduation ability to earn a living and ROI are important, but the varied interests and potential financial rewards associated with them make it impossible to generate meaningful comparisons.
I have 2 grads of generally high-ranked schools. One studied engineering, the other English. The Engineer made double the English grad for their first jobs…but the English grad works in an industry (publishing - which was always the goal) where just getting the entry-level job required some level of college selectivity. There were and are hundreds of applications for every entry position, and the new hires all seem to be from highly selective schools. (I don’t want to debate this…please… no need for the post about “the managing editor from Flagship U” or" County College"…it’s just her experience, which honestly is all that counts to us).
The math on the rankings will “benefit” the engineers’ undergrad institution, but in 20-30 years, I’d bet heavily that the English major earns more. Which is better? Rankings can’t address any of this…it’s just too personal and too complicated.