<p>^ It’s obviously bogus to compare schools across categories–a multidimensional university to a LAC, or a multidimensional university to a small unit within a university. Though on second thought, it might make some sense: a comprehensive university is going to have more influence, in the aggregate, than a medical school or a small LAC. That says nothing about the quality of the educational program or the benefits conferred on individuals passing through those institutions, just about the overall institutional impact.</p>
<p>But comparing apples-to-apples, we get Harvard University 7.53 times more influential than the University of Alabama. Sounds about right. We also get Middlebury College 1.06 times more influential than Bowdoin. Debatable, perhaps, but basically it’s a push, and hard to argue with. And we get Harvard Law School trouncing the University of Alabama School of Law by a factor of 28.98 to 1, again entirely plausible.</p>
<p>I’m not seriously defending the methodology–column-inches on Wikipedia of 100,000 or so living alumni of 3,000+ U.S. colleges and universities seems obviously inadequate to tell us anything useful. But it does point us in the direction of a more meaningful metric that attempts to measure the life trajectories and impacts of a broader subset of alumni–i.e., an outcome-based way of measuring colleges and universities, rather than a set of metrics focusing on inputs, which is the US News way.</p>