By:Alvin Wilson Staff Writer
“Top 100 colleges in the U.S.! Click here to see where yours ranks!”
Odds are, if you browse the internet or use any social media, you have seen a headline like this. But how much help do they really offer? Does the rank of your college really matter?
Well, not really.
An economics paper written by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger suggests that the college you attend really doesn’t matter when determining how much money you will make after graduation.
In their study, Dale and Krueger found that students who graduated from extremely selective colleges didn’t make more money than students who were accepted to the same college but chose to attend a less selective one.
What does this mean for you? It means that if you work hard and are intelligent enough to be accepted into an Ivy League school, you will likely be successful and make a lot of money regardless of where you graduate.
The college you attend doesn’t dictate how much money you will make.
Harvard is often at the top of the list when it comes to high-earning students. But does this mean that Harvard educates its students differently than a public university? Or does it simply mean the school is more selective, limiting its students to those who would have been successful regardless?
Organizations that rank colleges in the U.S. use methods that determine how much money a student who graduates from that college is expected to make. This can be problematic for many obvious reasons.
So how should we be ranking our colleges?
An article published recently in The Economist tries to answer that question.
The Economist used information provided by America’s Department of Education to put together a scoreboard for colleges and universities — one that they believe more accurately reflects how helpful a university is to its students.
They analyzed the financial aid information of hundreds of thousands of students from 1,275 institutions to determine the financial situation of students before they graduated.
They also analyzed their tax returns submitted after graduation and compared the expected earnings of a graduate with their actual median earnings.
For a college to rank highly on this scoring system, its students have to make more than the expected earnings of a graduate from that school. This method of ranking colleges is a much more accurate reflection of the actual value students get from their degrees.
There are, however, some problems with the rankings. The data only includes students who applied for financial aid, which excludes the children of wealthy parents. The information also only provides tax return information for the first ten years after graduation, so it doesn’t account for people who start high-paying jobs after more schooling or experience in the workforce.
It is also important to consider the type of student each college attracts. A college’s ranking could be negatively affected if, for example, it is a school for the deaf or blind.
Even though the scoring criteria provided by The Economist is a more accurate representation of how much a college helps its students upon graduation, students should still take its information lightly.
There are countless factors that can contribute to a college’s ranking.
To see where Western, or your future graduate school, ranks in The Economist’s scoreboard, visit their article here.
