UChicago: Bad Bang for the $ ?

JHS
Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:46:49 +0000

Here’s the base list: [Average Cost for College - Compare College Costs & ROI](http://www.payscale.com/education/average-cost-for-college-ROI)

In their methodology discussion, the researchers themselves note, “For some Liberal Arts, Ivy League, and highly selective schools, graduates with degrees higher than a bachelor’s degree can represent a significant fraction of all graduates.” Also, this was based on a survey, i.e., voluntary responses, and no guarantee of representativeness.

Chicago actually does better than Northwestern and Tufts, and a little worse than Cornell and Brown – Businessinsider.com just didn’t think any of them were newsworthy enough. Although there is a lot of noise, and the measurement is stupid, Chicago is actually pretty much equivalent to its actual peers (top non-HYPS private university-based liberal arts colleges), except for Penn which has both a large engineering school and a large undergraduate business school, and Dartmouth, which as many have noticed does very well in lifetime earnings surveys.

Also the measurement is even stupider than I thought, since in addition to excluding anyone with a graduate degree, they exclude anyone who is not a full-time employee. Consultants, entrepreneurs, successful retired people, artists and authors need not apply. (In fairness, excluding those people probably advantages Chicago relative to some of the other colleges we are talking about.) And, given the radical changes in Chicago’s undergraduate population since 1980, I’m not certain that the median earnings of single-degree, full-time employee 1980 graduates are much of an indication of what 2014 graduates can expect to earn in 2044.