#college-ranking

College Rankings: Previous Rankings

[ Part of a sequence of posts constructing my own college rankings. ]

I want to create my own college rankings based on alumni earnings - largely because I find the existing rankings' methodology so abysmal. So, before I get to that, here is a quick survey of existing college rankings.

"Quality" Rankings
  • US News - the defacto standard; a weighted sum of various parameters with no clear rationale [1]
  • Parchment Student Choice - treats each student as a chess game and each college as a chess player with an ELO rating; when a student chooses one college over another, that colleges "wins" a chess game against the other college [2]
  • Niche - a variety of different rankings - notably including a ranking for "top party schools" [3]
Economic Rankings
  • Payscale's College Salary Report - ranking of colleges based on the median pay of their alumni [4]. They also offer a return on investment model [5]
  • Princeton Review - offers a variety of ratings including their "Best Value" ranking that pulls from the Payscale data and adjusts for expected costs. [6]
  • Georgetown - another ROI ranking [7]
  • Brooking's Value-Added Rankings - a ranking of colleges based on how good their alumni's outcomes are controlling for the quality of the alumni [8]

The single ranking I could find that attempts to control for underlying ability is the one by the Brookings Institute [8], but I cannot divine the actual model from the report [9], and it seems likely it is simply a naive school-level linear regression, which has obvious short-comings.

There seems like obvious ways to improve on this status quo, and the next few posts will be my attempt to do so.

Works Cited

1. U.S. News Best Colleges. (2021). U.S. News. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges 2. Parchment Student Choice College Rankings 2022. (2021). parchment. https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php 3. 2022 Niche College Rankings. (2021). Niche. https://www.niche.com/colleges/rankings/ 4. Payscale's 2021-22 College Salary Report. (2021). payscale. https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report 5. Best Value Colleges. payscale. https://www.payscale.com/college-roi 6. Best Value Colleges. (2021). Princeton Review. https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings/best-value-colleges 7. Carnevale, A. P., Cheah, B. & Van Der Werf, M. (2020). Ranking ROI Of 4,500 US Colleges And Universities. Georgetown University. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/ 8. Kulkarni, S. & Rothwell, J. (2015). Beyond college rankings: A value-added approach to assessing two- and four-year schools. The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-college-rankings-a-value-added-approach-to-assessing-two-and-four-year-schools/ 9. Rothwell, J., & Kulkarni, S. (2015). Beyond College Rankings: A Value-Added Approach to Assessing Two- and Four-Year Schools. Metropolitan Policy Program. The Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/BMPP_CollegeValueAdded.pdf