I know you want metrics. But you want who graduated from which major earning how much money after five years. And when folks explain to you that in Classics- for example- this is a terrible metric of educational quality- you respond that you don’t know ANYONE who has ever studied Classics, so your point still stands.
Families will use whichever metrics are meaningful to THEM. And if a family in California knows nothing about Middlebury or Williams- two schools that the HS guidance counselor has suggested exploring- knowing their “rank”, however specious you believe it to be, is a helpful starting point. Not the be-all and end-all. But certainly learning that “reputationally” these are solid academic institutions- is a helpful way to begin.
We help kids find colleges with no snow, lots of snow, no humidity, tons of humidity, many frats, no frats. Certainly a metric which “kinda sorta” gets at actual academics shouldn’t get shunted away. Kid- you want Econ? You can study it at virtually every college in America. But Econ at U Chicago, MIT, Berkeley is substantively different from econ at some other institutions. You say you don’t care? Terrific. You don’t want a program that will require you to take Calculus? Terrific. You only want a program which will give you credit for the AP Stats course you took in HS? Terrific. Different strokes for different folks. But studying econ in a quantitatively rigorous manner, learning to manipulate and then interpret huge datasets (US census data, employment tax information for France from the launch of the Euro to today, GDP for the EU since Brexit) is a very different experience than learning the content rich/analytically poor version of econ taught at some colleges. And leads to different outcomes, even if those outcomes don’t result in a bigger salary after however many years.
And if “reputation” helps a family suss that out- seems like a useful tool to me.