Ahhhh. Pre marketing to get more looks.
What will happen if people’s target lists become less prestigious - uh oh.
They’re eliminating earnings from rich people so some big, few pay names, may fall if I surmise properly so those high end LACs like Colgate, the Tufts of the world may fall kid I have it right….at least in that part of the evaluation.
wow! over the last 2 years! that makes it sounds, well, not groundbreaking?! that said I don’t pay much attention in year-to-year changes.
Tufts has engineering and CS is their #1 major Top Undergraduate Majors - Office of Institutional Research?
Edit: I get it you… You mean they are all rich- kid schools! yes, they are similar that way. I thought you meant by majors.
But the school is heavy full pay and those kids do well - better than those getting aid most likely.
And they will be excluded if I read correctly.
But I guess we’ll see in 3+ weeks.
(I just edited as you were typing! I understand now - and yeah, looks like those kids will be eliminated).
I am still a little unsure about this data and where/what they are measuring but too lazy to dig in honestly.
I did just skim where/which schools moved buckets and 98% of schools seemed to be ones nobody on these boards talk much about.
Midwest LACs seem to have been particularly hard hit:
Aquinas
Concordia
Bethany Lutheran
Central College
Franklin College
Hope College
Westminster College
…all went from National Liberal Arts College to Regional Colleges (Midwest)
Using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, the Earnings by Major ranking factor evaluates earnings four years after graduation for employed students who received federal financial aid and whose highest degree is a bachelor’s. Because the measure evaluates outcomes only for federal financial aid recipients, this construct reduces the influence of pre-existing financial advantages and family networks, offering a clearer picture of the value an institution adds. It replaces the Graduate Indebtedness ranking factor, for which underlying federal data hasn’t been updated for several years and its future availability remains uncertain. The new measure relies on more recent data while addressing a question prospective students and families increasingly ask: “Is college worth it?”
Maybe I’m being naive, but this seems like a reasonable move to me. Am I missing something?
Their point is to show how much value a school adds vs just coming from a wealthy upbringing -sure.
Of course when rankings radically change - like the Villanova, Wash U, Wake, Tulane fall of a few years back then someone thinking top 20 or 50 if trusting that ranking may be disappointed.
Not sure how much career outcomes will impact but in some high end schools you’ll be eliminating data from 50%+ of the kids.
Is that right ? I don’t know.
But a rank in and of itself has no official meaning - and it only means to those it does matter.
That’s correct. But various rankings have been relying on College Scorecard for a number of years. Pretty sure the Washington Monthly “Mother Theresa” poll was one of the first.
I have not heard of one of those colleges before, so I suspect they should be regional…
Edit: looked up first, assuming it is in MI, it is 10% OOS according to college factual - seems pretty regional - lol. (Aquinas College Diversity: Student Body Analysis)
It’s quite comical that the one most seem to use can decide - ehhh - we’ll change our process - like it makes any school different than they were 3 months earlier.
Sadly schools that move largely will either highlight the move or demonize US News à la Vandy the other year.
By evaluating “outcomes only for federal financial aid recipients,” thereby attempting to “[reduce] the influence of pre-existing financial advantages and family networks,” while seeking to “offer a clearer picture of the value an institution adds,” U.S. News appears to be doing its best to approach the methods of social science.
I agree this seems reasonable as far as it goes. A few additional thoughts:
I’m not sure replacing their current Debt and Earnings measures with this measure will automatically hurt wealthier-family colleges. Nor automatically help.
First, Debt was always a bit of an odd measure. If you want to know the colleges most hurt by it, hear are some lists.
National Universities
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/most-debt
LACs:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges/most-debt
One obvious problem is the massive tie at $27000, and many others near, which of course is a federal loan limit issue.
And then in terms of Earnings, the existing measure was already limited to federal loan recipients, courtesy of IPEDS.
OK, so aside from getting rid of the Debt measure, the new Earnings measure controls for major mix. As they say:
U.S. News measures academic quality, not degree mix. To reduce the extent to which colleges are rewarded simply because their graduates are concentrated in higher-paying fields, U.S. News compares earnings only among graduates within specific academic disciplines, using statistical transformations to account for differences in earnings distributions across those fields. The result is a comparable measure of institutional performance rather than a metric driven primarily by which institution produces the most financial managers and petroleum engineers.
OK, but if you go back to the Chetty studies, NYT exposes, and similar, the highest skew to the highest-SES families was not at colleges with a lot of Engineering or even Business majors. It was at the most selective liberal arts tradition universities and colleges where usually a lower percentage on average were such majors, sometimes because they were not even offered. Which didn’t mean they were not sending a lot of kids into business and finance and so on, they just weren’t necessarily Business majors first.
So I am not at all sure implementing this sort of control for major mix will hurt the colleges with the most high-SES families as a rule. That said, because it remains limited to federal loan recipients, hard to know for sure what it will look like once they are done with the statistical transformations they are describing.
As a final thought, last time I recall people looking at controlling earnings for major mix, it was also very apparent the other big factor was locational. Like, in fact a less selective, more local college could still have higher earnings per major simply if it was located in an area with generally higher compensation.
I don’t see any sign the US News intends to tackle this problem, which is independently an issue, but also is yet another reason why I am not at all sure what is going to happen to the rankings in general.
All that said–if I had to bet, I would not bet against this helping elite liberal arts tradition colleges and universities whose graduates mostly go to VHCOL coastal cities, the kind where the English majors, say, don’t usually end up teachers but instead highly compensated professionals in some other field.
Is that all or just those from shi shi backgrounds. That’s part of the grade. I guess we shall see.
So I am not sure about “all” their graduates getting higher earning results, but “federal financial aid recipients” is an interesting category. I am assuming if they meant just Pell Grants, they would have said that, so this presumably also includes federal student loan recipients (also reported in IPEDS).
OK, then it is true excluding people who did not get Pell Grants and/or federal student loans is mostly going to exclude very high SES families. However, an awful lot of “middle income” families would be included.
So what is happening to middle income families at these colleges? Well, there are enough of them that I believe things like the Chetty studies et al apply, and they basically imply a lot of them are in fact going on to pretty good professional careers. Only a very few will be like top 0.1% earners, but many will end up what you might call upper middle class.
Again, none of this really guarantees anything about the upcoming rankings effects, including because I suspect it could depend on exactly how they handle those statistical transformations they mentioned. Still, I don’t think it is a bold statement to suggest the middle income families who took out some federal loans to go to these colleges often still have quite high earning kids in the end, even if they didn’t major in engineering.
Of course the Chetty studies implemented further controls for things like test scores and basically found most of those same kids could probably have gotten around the same earnings results going to a state flagship or such instead. But I don’t see the US News purporting to control for all that either.
This should be interesting because arguably the greatest benefit for someone from a low-income household attending a school like Princeton or Stanford is the network they can build from associating with students from a wealthy upbringing.
Not sure if fellow students per se are the secret sauce so much as 1. Faculty 2. Influential donors and 3. Alumni pipelines.
I guess places where secret societies or Greek societies still exist, those contacts still count as something. I also hear faint echoes of the lost art of “marrying well” which I also associate with the 1950s. i just don’t hear a lot of anecdotal evidence of people getting jobs with their hallmate’s family-owned business. I could be completely wrong.
So I think the studies have suggested for the lowest income students actually capable of being admitted to Ivy+ sorts of colleges, the big issue is when they don’t go to one of the most famous few private colleges, they also don’t necessarily go to another selective private, or indeed a flagship public, or possibly not even a four-year college at all.
This is sometimes interpreted in part as a sort of information gap. Like, they may have learned that these famous colleges might give them life-changing scholarships, but they don’t necessarily know they might also be able to get comparable scholarships at a lot of other colleges.
On the other hand, some have rightly pointed out for truly marginal families, the details really matter. And some colleges (although not necessarily just the most famous ones) may be better than others at really making sure the most marginal kids can actually attend, and in fact persist.
Still, this is typically a small enough group of enrolled students that whatever the most selective colleges are actually doing for them may not really make a big impact on this measure. Like even among federal aid recipients, the truly marginal students are typically still just a fraction.
On the other hand, when looking at less famous/selective institutions, this cohort can make up a much larger percentage of entrants–although unfortunately, perhaps a somewhat smaller percentage of graduates. But in any event, this change might well help some marginal kids better assess which institutions are truly more committed to trying to make college actually work out well for them.
As far as I can tell, this control aims to place schools with different mixes of majors on a level field. Its most direct effect may be in not putting colleges without engineering and business majors at a disadvantage. Conversely, schools with engineering and business majors may be relatively disadvantaged by this method in relation to their positions by the methods of other ranking systems.