Reply to where would top SLACs fall in an overall college ranking list?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "where would top SLACs fall in an overall college ranking list?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]be careful when reading these rankings unless you're prepare/able to look at methodology.

for example, for salaries on the WSJ ranking, they use two numbers. here they are. if you thought it was something to do with "salary", you'd be wrong.

Salary impact (67%): This measures the extent to which a college boosts its graduates’ salaries beyond what they would be expected to earn regardless of which college they attended. We used statistical modeling to estimate what we would expect the median earnings of a college’s graduates to be on the basis of the exam results of its students prior to attending the college and the cost of living in the state in which the college is based.  We then scored the college on its performance against that estimate. These scores were then combined with scores for raw graduate salaries to factor in absolute performance alongside performance relative to our estimates. Our analysis for this metric used research on this topic by the policy-research think tank the Brookings Institution as a guide.

Years to pay off net price (33%): This measure combines two figures—the average net price of attending the college, and the value added to graduates’ median salary attributable to attending the college. The value added to graduates’ median salary by a college was estimated on the basis of the difference between the median earnings of the school’s graduates and the median earnings of high-school graduates in the state where the college is located and across the U.S. in proportion to the ratio of students who are in-state versus out-of-state. We then took the average annual net price of attending the college—including costs like tuition and fees, room and board, and books and supplies, taking into account any grants and scholarships, for students who received federal financial aid—and multiplied it by four to reflect an estimated cost of a four-year program. We then divided this overall net-price figure by the value added to a graduate’s salary, to provide an estimate of how quickly an education at the college pays for itself through the salary boost it provides. Our analysis for this metric used research on this topic by the policy-research think tank Third Way as a guide.

---

this is really about the distance a college propels a student. so a immigrant kid from stuy who goes to MIT - who also has a low Net Price - that's a great outcome.

a rich kid who would have done just fine at Middlebury or Vandy? who paid full price for either? and would also have been just as rich and connected if they went to UVM? less a distance traveled story. lower salary number.  even though kid 2 here might be making more (with those great connections!) than kid 1.

[/quote]

But all schools are ranked the same on this metric and [b]a school like Princeton comes out on top while Williams drops to 245[/b].

Williams also is very generous with FA, so the two schools are fairly comparable in terms of student body.

It’s all a bit of a black box.[/quote]

It's hard to believe there is that big a difference in outcome between Princeton and Williams.  If you look at things like law school and med school placement adjusted for student body size, Williams is near the top.[/quote]

Again…not by WSJ rankings which only looks at the kids that get jobs (so grad school doesn’t impact this at all).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics