A similar observation can be made about the CA community college system and transfer pathway, another system that contributes in a huge way to its students achieving more success than would have been expected from their performance in high school… which is a fine thing in itself, but doesn’t make CA community colleges the “best” colleges in the US.
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Agree, fully about the benefit of the California state and University systems. Also agree fully that any “modeling” computer generated hypothetical potential income “reports” are not worth the paper they’re printed on.
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Exactly. Its artificial.
U.S. News & World Report’s upward mobility calculation involves assessing the proportion of Pell Grant recipients enrolled and graduating, comparing Pell Grant students’ graduation rates to those of non-Pell Grant students, and using College Scorecard data to measure how many graduates earn more than a typical high school graduate four years after graduation. These factors are combined into a Social Mobility Index to determine how effectively a college serves and advances economically disadvantaged students.
Take your pick.
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The USNWR criterion that is the closest analogue is “graduation rate performance”, that is the graduation rate relative to that generally expected for students that the college gets (i.e. a college that gets high school B students has its graduation rate compared to the overall college graduation rate of high school B students who go to college). This WSJ ranking also includes something similar with respect to graduation rates as well as post-graduation pay levels.
Basically, the idea is to see what the value in graduation rate the college adds (or subtracts) versus an average college with the same students, rather than mostly proxying admission selectivity and student / family money, which is what raw graduation rates do. (But USNWR also includes raw graduation rates at a higher weight than graduation rate performance.)
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Unless my old eyes deceive, CC’s beloved Williams is nowhere on this list. Which makes its validity forfeit.
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I believe that calculation was added to the 2019 rankings in 2018. It is one of the widely discussed additions that many feel degraded the integrity of the USNWR rankings along with the additional changes made to the 2024 rankings in 2023.
I’m unclear as to why social mobility should degrade the rankings (even if one argues with how it’s measured). Isn’t that the point of the American Dream?
I suppose a wealthy kid and an economically disadvantaged kid would see this differently and yet both are utilizing the same rank to measure pedigree.
The Florida rankings show FIU, Florida International University as the top school in Florida and most would argue its not the top school in Miami compared to UM University of Miami , plus its ahead of UF, FSU, USF, and UCF
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This may be my least favorite ranking. My biggest issue is that everything is behind a paywall, so it’s mostly a black box creates a list of colleges. Other rankings may be mostly useless, but at least I can see details about the ranking and how results were calculated. Beyond that, it’s my understanding the WSJ ranking claims to be primarily about the financial influence attending the college has on outcome. This is complicated to measure, and the bits of information that has been posted about the methodology suggests that ranking is not measuring this criteria well.
Financial outcome has a strong dependence on the individual student including preferred major and career path, academic qualifications, motivations, family/personal connections, SES background, etc. Studies comparing outcomes between similarly qualified students who apply to similar colleges, but attend different colleges (for example, rejected by “reach”, attends “match”), often find college name has very little impact on average earnings. However, they often do find particular minority subsets of the general population for which impact of college name is statistically significant, such as lower income students or persons who work in “elite” finance.
This level of granularity is not encompassed by the methodology, which sounds like it looks at a combination of “raw graduate salaries” and whether the average salary of graduates is above or below expectations based on average SAT score of students attending the college. I’d expect colleges where a large portion of students major in CS or pursue finance to do well by the latter measure. And I’d expect colleges with a lot of humanities majors and few tech majors (traditional LACs) to do poorly by this measure. I can’t confirm whether this expectation is true or not because it’s behind a paywall, so can’t look at subscores on “salary impact.”
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USN peer assessment survey is far more bothersome to me. It drives so much of the order we see, yet is administered by them, and has so much bias that many schools refuse to answer the questions all together. That is the greatest blackbox in all of rankings and it has been around forever. Favorite is obviously subjective but I find this to be a breath of fresh air.
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I think it is interesting that Loyola MD is on this list- I know quite a few grads who went there (pretty long ago) but they are all in quite high powered careers and making very good salaries. Many living in NYC, but also other parts of the east coast. I think the location piece is part of it- but it’s the only school in the midatlantic on the list besides Penn and those two aren’t usually on the same lists.
Or how low they rank the school(s) you love to hate.
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Methodology matters… around a decade ago the WSJ ranked schools based on what recruiters reported in a survey, and of the top 25, 15 were “elite” publics like UofM, UIUC, UNC Chapel Hill, etc. The top school? Penn State. The only Ivy to make the list was Cornell, on the strength of its hotel management and engineering programs.
Of course, corporate recruiters were looking for new cogs in the machine. Had the WSJ surveyed top consulting firms where they are selling prestige to clients the list would have been very different.
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Of course methodology matters. If you want to measure “ROI”, West Point and the other academies are head and shoulders above everyone else. Kid pays nothing; four years later ends up in a leadership role in their desired career path. Nobody beats that. Which is why these lists have to torture the methodology to come up with a list that people want to read.
It’s like the banal videos shown during the Olympics. Do people want to see a champion who has been groomed since birth, had every advantage, been coached by the world’s finest? They do not. They want to see a champion whose dad died when they were five and whose single mom drove 30 miles at 5 am every morning to the ice rink because that’s when practice time was free, and the kid was coached by the rink’s owner who once tried out for the Ice Capades in 1969.
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This is something that has always bothered me about most of the things I’ve seen that discuss or rank colleges based on general graduate salaries. Some schools have large swaths of students who are aiming to go into high paying industries and major accordingly, others with similar level of qualified kids less so. Pomona, Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd are a textbook example that bears this out. Three very similarly selective schools that are literally adjacent to one another where students can cross register for classes across the schools. Yet, graduate salary data are significantly different. Not because of the quality of the students or education. But, because on average the focus of the students who choose each are quite different in general - from traditional liberal arts academic type, to more pre-professional type, to CS and engineering type.
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Not to mention one of the tightest alumni networks in the US, and the fact that employers (especially defense contractors) love - I’m using the word “LOVE” - hiring ring knockers.
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Proof that this ranking is AI-generated garbage: It lists Pomona College as “Pomona College, Claremont CA, formerly Houston Baptist University”.
???!!!
There is a Houston Baptist University that changed its name to Houston Christian University in 2022. How on earth could AI turn that into Pomona College? And is the data for that entry from Pomona or HCU?
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Williams is at 108 out of the 584 colleges ranked by WSJ.