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]
- 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.