<p>It could be the careers that students pursue or don’t pursue. Perhaps less students pursue high/decent wage professions. For example, most of the other top 20s have engineering/applied sciences schools (of which maybe 1k or more of the UG student body ends up in many cases), and this will bring the mid-wage salary up (in fact, other schools, especially peers have plenty more undergraduate professional schools). Also, I think many other schools are better at things like pre-health placement (if the pre-meds aren’t getting into med. school, and then give up and don’t have an idea of what to pursue, it will certainly delay things). At Emory, it could be many students having a “high wage pre-professional or bust” attitude, without a lot of honesty in the advising and self-realization in the process. This leads to narrow goals and little to no back-ups. I also suppose Emory would do better than this despite having less UG professional school if it were like Chicago and maybe had a stronger econ. program (that could push more ECAS students on to wall street or somewhere) or had more success in getting students to go into academia and be successful. Usually, the pre-prof. endeavors are a lot more high-risk and then even if you get into the prof. school, then students accumulate a bit of debt (whereas, if Emory was better at placing more/promoting students into well-funded science Ph.D programs, or even non-science, you may have less of the “oh no, I didn’t get into x professional school, now I’m screwed for life” situations). Part of it could be on the student body mentality toward career goals and how some of them are extremely inflexible and perhaps not creative, and part of it is perhaps the lackluster advising that may even perpetuate such attitudes sometimes. </p>
<p>Even with all of this said, many other ranking agencies would actually consider Emory to be decent (perhaps not great, because this place is very expensive, but not as bad as this, which honestly, I don’t expect Emory to perform but so well in…) even in this category, so I can’t say for sure if I’m on to something. And don’t say it “dropped” to that, the two rankings are unrelated. They measure two different things in two different ways. I mean, again, the methodology of this one seems to differ from those who would label the place a best value (and other publications that take into account return on investment).</p>