@RustyTrowel, it’s amazing, isn’t it, how little international perspective makes it into debates on domestic issues in the US - the presumption is that everything is better, the facts be d@mned.
Too bad very few of us are ‘average’. I would love to see a list at sticker price, with salary outcomes adjusted for cost of living and graduate education. State flagships would be at the very top.
What do you mean by cost of living? Are you assuming graduates go to work in the city the school is in?
@philbegas , no, but they graduates to take jobs in the region where they are located. For instance, for a given job, I might need to earn $40,000/ year more to equalize the cost of living and higher taxes in the bay area vs. Indianapolis. So, even a lifetime earning difference of $1 million at Cal vs Indiana, which would greatly affect a ranking based system on salary, would have no real world meaning.
@TooOld4School
While I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, isn’t that something that the students/parents/counselors should be looking up on a case by case situation? This college ranking that you’re hypothesizing would only apply to graduates from the university if they followed the prescribed route of getting a job in the area the university is in.
For example. I’m from CA, but if I end up going to a school like NEU, and then coming back to work in CA, the ranking wouldn’t apply to me because I didn’t go to work in MA.
@philbegas , sure but all of the rankings are based on averages. Each family needs to create their own specific ranking matrix since prices and outcomes are different for each student. Quite frankly, I am surprised that USN or some other data aggregator does not have a fully customizable ranking system
With the Bloomberg one you can rank by the 4 factor they consider which is nice. However, you cannot change the weight of the different parameters which would be nice.
It appears a few of the obvious schools, Harvard, Princeton, NYU, were left out
It’s always annoying when they use average price instead of sticker price. YMMV.
If you don’t want to click 25 times just type it into the url, at the end where there is a number (the page number)
But that is the problem with click through lists, it took you a month and a half to find the shortcut. 
I love these studies. Forbes will do anything for sales.
@markham Once again we are treated to discourses on how fantastic the LACs are. Reminds me of posts about how “Harvard really isn’t that great”.
These rankings seem designed to reassure the insecure. Princeton and Harvard don’t need to be on them because everyone knows they are great universities.
This year they put them all on one page.
^
10 Expensive Colleges Worth Every Penny 2017
- Amherst
- Dartmouth
- Williams
- UChicago
- Tufts
- Colgate
- UPenn
- Columbia
- Hamilton
- Vassar
(Forbes.)
Harvard is not on the list, let alone top of the list. Ergo – this ranking is bull.
@Chrchill this ranking is measuring something Harvard doesn’t have, obviously. Still, if there is a methodology for THIS list, I haven’t seen it.
It appears to take into account how many low income kids attend (guessing based on Amherst and Vassar which have both won the JC Cooke award for that, and Columbia). I can’t see anything else with the rest. Typically these ROI-ish rankings wind up with lots of engineering schools at the top but that’s not the case here, it seems.
As irony – that is, as an indirect observation that ranking systems typically establish their methodologies so that they will comport with a set of expected results – what @Chrchill posted seems to work well though.
The credibility of any ranking can easily be judged by where it places Harvard. It is a great and credible ranking if Harvard tops the list. The lower Harvard, the less credible the ranking.
Lol how do you figure that? What if it was a top 10 ranking and Harvard was #11? Harvard isn’t going to be #1 for everything, there’s over 2 thousand schools in the united states.