Anonymous wrote:The list is schools with the most kids (often men) who major in engineering and comp sci and finance and make a lot of money.

Anonymous wrote:People might be misinterpreting these results. As I understand it, the ranking shows which schools produce the biggest bang (outcomes) for the buck (cost minus aid), essentially a ROI, with a few other measures too (30%). So, if the average cost to attend is high, even good outcomes are significantly offset. On the other hand, if the average cost to attend is low, just a better-than-average outcome would rank the school highly. So, it’s the balance of the two that gets a school highly ranked.

Anonymous wrote:What’s so curious to me is how did Emma Tucker, the editor in chief, even get this job. Obviously, a best colleges list for the WSJ is a big roll out. What was the thinking here?

It’s so manifestly stupid and thoughtless. And there was a huge opportunity to claim this space.

And they went with what they did.

Baffling.

Clearly morons in control at WSJ.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As soon as you see Babson at #2, ahead of Stanford, Yale, MIT, etc, you know this list is a joke!

Bingo.

This list is lacking any semblance of student quality ranking. Student peers matter. Parents and families want kids to go to the schools that people know have smart kids. This list has zero assessment for smarts.

Anonymous wrote:UC Merced is definitely a top 20 school. NYU at 250+ is a borderline community college.

The Wall Street Journal did a fine rankings job.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I do like the criteria though.. Limited fluff/BS factors, not based on hoity-toity professorial 'reputation' opinions (like we care). It's all about the money.

Though it is a weird methodology that they actually use. It's not just raw salary data for the schools.

Salary impact (33%): 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.

Anonymous wrote:
For outcome, I would just go here. The ranking has big discrepancy.

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/

Anonymous wrote:I've never heard of 2 schools in the Top 10 (Babson, Claremont McKenna).

Guessing I can't afford those anyway.

Anonymous wrote:The list is schools with the most kids (often men) who major in engineering and comp sci and finance and make a lot of money.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People might be misinterpreting these results. As I understand it, the ranking shows which schools produce the biggest bang (outcomes) for the buck (cost minus aid), essentially a ROI, with a few other measures too (30%). So, if the average cost to attend is high, even good outcomes are significantly offset. On the other hand, if the average cost to attend is low, just a better-than-average outcome would rank the school highly. So, it’s the balance of the two that gets a school highly ranked.

This is the way I read it as well. I have kids at two of the schools, and the normally much higher-ranked one is ranked well below the other school. But the WSJ lower-ranked school is much more expensive. At least initially, the kid going there will make much less money than the one at the better-ranked (by WSJ) university, at least initially.