<p>@tk21769 The Princeton Review tries to measure student satisfaction with a mix of self-reported and school-reported metrics. Its ratings are dubious but perhaps not nonsensical. e.g. Top LACs like Reed, Swarthmore, Williams, as one might expect, have the highest academic ratings. The top universities have slightly lower academic ratings, because of class sizes, TA use, etc. (For some reason, Princeton scored lower than Harvard and Yale, both of which tied with Chicago this year. The ratings have a fair bit of noise.)</p>
<p>Here’s my shameless plug: I think that the Alumni Factor rankings are worth a look, which is why I keep posting on the thread I made about them. The company surveys a few hundred alumni from each of fifteen-hundred schools per year about their college experiences, correcting for age, gender, statistical outliers, and other differences in the schools’ samples. (Presumably, the alumni do not know that their responses are to be used to rate their colleges.) The top 227 schools are ranked. The results are neither out-of-the-blue nor predictable. </p>
<p>cf. Ranking of alumni satisfaction with intellectual development: Reed, Swarthmore, Chicago, and Yale are in the top twenty, along with not-so-usual suspects like Sewanee: University of the South, Centre College, and Kalamazoo College. SLACs do much better than universities, and small schools do much better than large schools. The results aren’t shocking for those who have looked at books like Colleges That Change Lives and Looking Beyond the Ivy League. </p>
<p>Some of the individual PR rankings are dubious indeed. In the “Best College Library” ranking, Hampton-Sydney College ranks #4 (between #3 Yale and #5 Harvard). But note the very first sentence in the H-S College Master Plan:
“High on the list of College priorities is the provision of more and better library space.”
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<p>This suggests to me that the responding students must have been very easily satisfied.
Either that, or their library really is fabulous … yet they are STILL not happy!</p>
<p>How would you propose judging the quality of jobs that graduates obtain? Eg, College of the Atlantic sends many graduates into state conservation corp programs which pay almost nothing but match a number of students’ short term aspirations. Additionally, wouldn’t a school like Northeastern, which has a much weaker English program than say, Fordham, perform better on job placement scores, despite the fact that students haven’t had nearly the same educational experiences?</p>
<p>Location: you should expect that most graduates will stay within a few hundred mile radius of their campus. But how far away have the graduates found employment within their fields? A high quality school should have graduates landing jobs and graduate school acceptances far beyond the borders of their state.</p>
<p>Income: income ranges are govern by location. Nevertheless, are the incomes within the majors at or exceeding the median compensation for that degree.</p>
<p>Graduate school opportunities: are the graduates able to land admission to competitive graduate schools. This will give you an indication for the academic reputation and preparation provided by that college.</p>
<p>Jobs: are graduates able to land jobs within the largest companies or organization for their fields. This will indicate whether opportunities are closed or open to graduates based on their schools.</p>
<p>Loan Default: this is a little tougher to use because other than the raw data that I’ve seen, I haven’t encountered a good resource that contained metrics for this in a usable way. But you should look at these rates when comparing schools and find out why rates are high (unemployment, lack of scholarships, etc.)</p>
<p>Subjective factors should be left to the individual. Have other graduates achieved your goals.</p>
<p>frugaldoctor, what are good, usable metrics for the other outcomes you mentioned?</p>
<p>For example, how would a HS student measure and compare how far away a school’s alumni are finding jobs? </p>
<p>Where is a good source for comparing admission application and acceptance rates for a wide variety of graduate and professional schools? Some years ago, the Wall Street Journal did a ranking of “feeder schools” for a collection of ~15 law, medical, and business schools. I’ve never seen this repeated on a larger scale. A HS student could poke around on individual college web sites for statistics on the number of alumni who go to grad school … but the site won’t necessarily tell you much about the competitiveness of those graduate school programs (aside from mentioning a few schools where graduates have been admitted). The data may not be expressed in numbers that are easily compared from college to college. </p>
<p>Ditto for the size/competitiveness of alumni employers. Some business schools do publish detailed stats on the number of recent graduates hired by certain sought-after employers. I’m not familiar with any sites that make it easy to compare colleges, systematically, for employment in a wide variety of sectors. How would I find out, for example, which colleges are the best “feeders” into top advertising firms, publishing firms, or biomedical research companies? </p>
<p>So I’d use a combination of the “American Leaders”, PhD production, and competitive national student awards rankings (all sub-categories of Forbes ranking) and the WSJ professional school feeders ranking. Also add in some criteria which I personally care about (Wall Street targets and startup entrepreneurs produced).</p>
<p>That would separate out some of the top elite privates (Vandy isn’t in the top 50 of any of those 4 rankings despite entering SAT scores that are comparable to the other private elites while all the Ivies besides UPenn + Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Rice, & UChicago are in the top 50 of all 4; UPenn, Northwestern, & JHU just miss the top 50 in some). Meanwhile, Cal, despite average SAT scores that are below these private elites, does as well as UPenn, Northwestern, & JHU (and better than Vandy and WashU).
Some schools are top 30 or top 10 in all 4. </p>
<p>The LACs do VERY well. I’ll publish these rankings/tiers at some point.</p>
<p>Most colleges will conduct surveys of their graduates for employment and graduate school placement, etc. These surveys aren’t standardized, so it may be difficult to get an unbiased comparison between colleges. But they provide a lot of insight to the outcomes for those schools.</p>
<p>I don’t worry too much about admission rates for graduate schools; schools fudge those numbers and may not be completely aware of the plans of their graduates a few years after they leave. Also, graduate school may be based on the ambitions of the student body. As I’ve heard in the past, Harvey Mudd and Caltech place a lot of students into graduate school. But, a very high percentage of incoming students aspire to attend graduate school. So, the numbers are skewed. </p>
<p>However, only a relatively small percentage of schools make any survey results publicly available (at least by major, which is a stronger factor in employment outcomes than school attended in many cases).</p>
<p>In addition, like many of the other outcome metrics discussed in this thread, context of both admission selectivity and student self-selection (into schools and majors) needs to be considered, although sufficient data to compare outcomes versus inputs may be difficult to find in a way that allows comparing different schools.</p>
<p>The size of the endowment fund will be an indicator of how financially sound a college is without tuition revenue. Why without tuition? Most analyst say that college tuition rates are highly inflated and a correction is due - Student Loan Bubble. It is claimed the student loan programs will tighten and the open credit lines will end with a credit crunch reducing available financing, our current open fire hydrant that will be replaced with a garden hose. If financial institutions cap student debt at 20 or 30K then how can colleges not lower tuition and cut services. The size of a schools endowment fund will be a key determining factor as to which institutions survive, merge or fail.</p>
<p>For financial data about schools US News and Forbes do not cut it.</p>