http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-university Their methodology is actually pretty interesting. Basically based on things like sat score, gender, etc. they estimate what a person from that university should be making vs what they actually do. Here are the Texas schools UT $-1,692 A&M $-2,615 UH $-1,826 Rice $-10,267 Baylor University $-112 Tech $-1,188 TCU $-3,770 Texas schools don't seem to be providing that much value to their students.
Very interesting! Thanks for posting. What I like about this, warts and all, is that it gets to the idea of yield curve. A lot of the most prestigious universities have extremely good students as "input," so of course the output should be good, unless the university was a complete and utter failure. It's very hard to measure, but show me universities that move the students the farthest from start to finish in terms of their actual education. (I'm not sure earning power is the best measure of that, but it's, kind of, a measure, and it's a start.)
CalTech and Yale both rank at near the absolute bottom (with Rice). One of the "problems" with this ranking measure is that some schools, like CalTech, just turn out people who want to do more research, so they head to grad. school and become professors. In my biased opinion, there's nothing "wrong" with that, but it skews post-graduation earnings downward, a LOT. When I got out of Rice, long ago, I went and earned peanuts as a graduate research assistant earning my PhD, for instance. Still loving this list though.
Washington University is consistently ranked around the top 13 schools in the country and it is ranked 986 here. I dont approve.
Very interesting ranking, though far from a complete picture. Has me wondering 2 things: 1. It doesn't seem to me they gave any consideration to the cost of the education. Is that right? It looks like they are just doing a wins-above-replacement-player type analysis. It seems like the elites tend to sink to the bottom and the more humbly priced schools rise to the top anyway, but I wonder what happens if you consider the difference in the investment costs. 2. The implication here seems to be that, except for the value-add modifier from the school, graduates of these schools will earn according to their intrinsic potential (measured in their demographic data, geography, and SAT scores). So, someone who could have studied biology at Rice takes a -10k penalty, but he could choose to study at University of St Joseph instead and take a +10k bonus. But the median income out of St Joseph is $50k, while the median income out of Rice is $60k. If I get an acceptance letter from Rice, should I really just gamble on my merit by going to St Joseph and betting that by starting as overqualified that I will outperform? Sounds risky.
Can anyone verify whether they somehow included a "location" factor in the expected earnings calculations? A lot of graduates from Texas/Midwest/Southern schools are going to have lower actual median earnings because a majority of them probably end up staying put in places that have a lower cost of living.. If that same factor isn't applied to the expected earnings, then those numbers are going to be heavily influenced by the incomes of the heavily populated coastal regions that have a much higher cost of living.
Uh, the ranking have Rice at #1271 and Yale at #1270, so is Yale overrated, too. This issue here might be poor use of "Realized Salary" The differential of Expected earnings to Realized doesn't seem to be taking into account Salary Adjustment by city. Rice is expected $70k, which is a high ranking, $20k above UofHouston. Looks like the city of Houston doesn't have high salaries though compared to Boston and SF. Overrated might be the wrong word here versus the numbers not accounting for regional salaries. You need to make 10s of thousands of dollars more in Boston and SF than you do Houston. And likely the majority of Rice kids get first jobs in Houston.
you are talking about the difference, though. we are questioning the Realized side of the formula. that will depend upon which city you get your first job in
Yeah the salaries did seem kind of low. But if I understood it correctly... these were just the salaries for people who have graduated since 2011. So this doesn't include people who have been working for a while.
since no one has responded to my very clear 'splaination of the fallacy of both Yale and Rice being in the bottom five of this poll. I'll just assume you are all idiots. And I will. Don't bother responding me...idiots It's nice to find you.
I imagine expected earnings has take the location into consideration already. That is, what they could have earned without attending that university should be correlated with where the university is located and capability of the students of getting to other similar universities. Don't know for sure though.
Well, if that's true, then Rice's expected earning would be #1 on the list. Rice, Stanford, MIT and the Ivy league are all in the upper echelon of the $70k range. The Economist places them way too close in expected earnings to Harvard, MIT and Stanford, for that to be true. Houston is nowhere close to earnings requirements of San Francisco and Boston or even Boulder. My company moved me from Houston to Boulder, but I refused to move until they increased by salary by 20%. bottomline: any ranking that puts Yale and Rice at the very last 10 of their list of over 1200 schools is simply wrong. Sad that the Economist (a highly respected journal) could actually publish such a useless ranking. The only thing that makes sense is they are not adjusting realized earnings to mean salaries in the city where the student got the job.
