I’ll go ahead and throw out my first draft of what would be included with my ranking methodology, and at least give some category percentages, even if not a percentage for each factor in a category.
Outcomes (25%)
• Percentage of students accepted to graduate school
• Percentage of students accepted to their top choice graduate school
• Median grad test scores (LSAT, MCAT, GRE, etc.)
• Median grad test scores as compared to expected (based on college entrance tests from incoming students)
• Percentage of grads passing licensing certifications (whether nursing, engineering, nutrition, etc)
• Percentage of grads employed in a field related to their major that requires a college degree
• Percentage of grads employed in a job that requires a college degree
Academics (25%)
• Percentage of classes under 20
• Percentage of classes under 50
• Percentage of full-time faculty (or tenure-track faculty)
• Student: Faculty Ratio
Retention & Graduation (20%)
• Graduation rate
• Graduation rate compared to expected graduation rate (based on profile of incoming students)
• Freshmen retention
• Freshmen retention as compared to expected graduation rate (based on profile of incoming students)
• Percentage of transfers
Reputation & Selectivity (15%)
• SAT/ACT scores of incoming students
• Survey from HR departments at Fortune 1000 companies
• Survey from colleges
Financials (15%)
• Financial health grade of institution
• Endowment/student
• Percentage of loan principal remaining after 5/10 years
• Percentage of students who default on student loans
• NPV at 20 and/or 40 years (see A First Try at ROI: Ranking 4,500 Colleges - CEW Georgetown)
Rather than rankings, I’d separate them out into tiers. And instead of separation by universities vs. liberal arts and national/regional, I would sort them by the Carnegie classification for size and setting (see Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education®).
• Very small and small (up to 2,999 students): Highly Residential & Primarily Residential
• Medium (3,000-9,999 students): Highly Residential & Primarily Residential
• Large (10,000+ students): Highly Residential & Primarily Residential
• Primarily Nonresidential (all sizes)
General notes on rationale:
• Outcomes: This is kind of to see, does the “market” (grad schools/employers/licensure boards) view the education as successful
• Academics: This more to gauge the quality of quantity/quality of attention that students are likely to receive while at the university
• Retention & Graduation: Are they helping students succeed? And are their success rates because of who came to them, or because of the actions of the school in making them more successful?
• Reputation & Selectivity: This is one I have difficulty with. This is trying to capture what a student’s peer group is like, and gather differences between Harvard and Directional State U that might not be fully captured elsewhere. For instance, maybe a Harvard grad is apply to the top 5-10 grad schools or other top employers, whereas the Directional State U is looking at a completely different set of grad schools and the selectivity of the two have little overlap. But I don’t know if this just continues to feed into the prestige/cachet factor, and if all the other categories’ outcomes are positive, should reputation come in here to skew things? Thoughts?
• Financials: Is the school financially stable? The NPV (though a new-ish factor) helps to see, if there are two liberal arts schools, and one’s 40-year NPV is $700,000 and another’s is $950,000, then that’s a factor (as this is more helpful when comparing the same type of university as some fields like STEM regularly have higher earnings than many liberal arts fields).
• Tiers by residential nature of campus and campus size: I don’t know many who care if their 3500 student university is classified as a liberal arts college, regional college, or regional university (or national university). But people do care about how big their university is and whether it’s a commuter school.
What would you have on your own methodology? Why? What would you take away from this one? Why?