Move to somewhere with a state income tax, triple digit registration fees, and like one or two public grad schools in the entire state, then we can whine about Texas. I do not understand the compulsion of all these publications, particularly already respectable and profitable ones like WSJ and Economist, to waste time ranking colleges.
Rice wanted to charge 40k. UT offered a scholarship. Maybe it has changed now, there is no point of going to Rice unless Rice offers you money. Unless you are getting into an Ivy league school might as well go to a decent public school.
Yale is ranked #1270 by this Economist' formula. Your theory of Ivy League schools doesn't agree with the Economist. I agree that going to the top public schools is a decent plan when money is an issue, especially if your plan is to go to graduate school. But, I don't think you have any experience with the value of a small private school like Rice in the sheer superior education experience of never having grad students teaching classes. The crop of professors/lecturers at Rice is as top-class as any Ivy League school, including Harvard. The quality of learning is substantially better at small, private schools to large public schools, especially freshman and sophmore years. Yet, many people (like you, apparently, and the Economist) don't appreciate that and only look at money. btw: comparing Rice to Harvard in earnings also misses the point that schools like Rice and Carnegie Melon don't pump out the volume of Finance/Business majors as Harvard does, because they are Engineering schools. Often Finance/Business grads make more money because those jobs pay more out of school (or provide Sales bonuses) like going to Wall Street in NYC. Rice has a relatively small amount of Finance/Business majors. Further, when you come from money, it is a lot easier to make money. Kids from very wealthy families often go to Ivy League schools, and they make money after regardless to how smart they are or the learning experience. The Harvards of the world generate leaders because the kids parents set them up for that. You have to factor that in. Those schools have self-perpetuating success just like wealthy families do.
I also find it weird that so many people from Texas (like in this thread) bad-mouth a school in Texas whose charter was to be a top tech institute in the US. Why do you guys do this, by arguing Yankee institutes are better. Have some Texas pride. Don't be so defensive. Y'all know Rice is an outstanding learning school that attracts cream of the crop students. I'd never go to a Yankee school.
Here is what the article claims is the motivation for the study: The idea is to compare the inputs (expected median salary for incoming class given predictive measures) with the outputs (actual median salary). Is it a useful metric? Depends on what you're able to infer from it. Personally, I think there are diminishing returns to exclusive educations, and many people who go to elite institutions even though they are projected to graduate low in their class would be better off at a relatively less competitive school. Rice and Yale are outliers. Both are much smaller than their competition, incredibly selective, and hyper-competitive. Rice takes rich kids from across the country and feeds them into job markets in Texas and the South where salaries are lower than they are on the coasts, while Yale takes rich kids from across the country and feeds them into academia, where salaries are low because its academia. If all you care about is your salary after graduation, don't go to Rice or Yale, period.
I don't have specific knowledge, but I'd think their geographic modifier would be for where the graduates are working. They are using tax return data, so they have addresses to be able to do that. And, does it make any sense to judge a school by its nearby economy if its graduates are all on the other side of the country 10 years later? Economist is clear that they present this ranking as a data point in a much larger tapestry. They say this is not the end-all ranking of the worth of schools. As for the criteria they put schools to: they brought data and made a cogent argument. Instead of getting in a huff about it, why don't you take what value it offers instead of taking offense?
The expected earnings number is pretty dubious. Harvard guys are only expected to make 74K after they spent over 200K in tuition?
Most majors don't pay that much. You need to go to medschool, law school, mba etc. before you make the big
Seems like a value ranking which is important to know. However, you could argue that the ceiling is lower on some of these schools with great value.
You just contradicted yourself, though. You said Rice students get jobs in lower paying cities. But those are good salaries versus the higher ones in SF, Boston and NYC. Then you say don't go to Rice if you care about salary. You can't compare a Houston salary $1 for $1 to SF, Boston and NYC.
btw: I fundamentally do agree that many state schools are perfectly fine options if you look at salary only. I already said that. You just said I have to agree and take value from it; otherwise, I'm making a "Huff" about it. In a statistical study, there is nothing wrong with saying the math is bad. They aren't correctly comparing salaries, and Rice in the bottom 10 is proof of that. They give Rice a very high Expected Salary, then penalize the school for putting a lot of graduates into cities that have low mean salaries It's lazy math to not take into consideration location of where you get your job and adjust that to a national average for each type of job.
Starting salary with relatively smooth path to mid-to-high six figures as eventual senior managers in pretty much any field; multiplied by forty years.
Lies. Baylor is expensive and sucks. Texas state is reasonable and awesome. Flawed metric I tell you!
Essentially, because the Economist is highly respected and has the means to hire real statisticians to build a real analysis, I give them a lot of deference and assume they've thought carefully about the choices they've made. Meanwhile, a bunch of yahoos on the internet, after discovering their alma mater is ranked low, have given the subject 5 minutes' thought with no education in statistics and come to the firm conclusion that the work the professionals have done is worthless because it doesn't confirm their previously held biases. Maybe you're totally right that their math is bad. I haven't read deeply enough on their methodology to have my own opinion on it. Ideally, if you're going to say their math is bad, you could get specific about how they should have done the math. But that's a lot of work and tedious and not realistic. So, instead you're appealing to your trustworthiness to review and judge their method. If you want to come on the internet and have people trust in your expertise on the subject over the expertise of the Economist, at least bring some bonafides. What educational or vocational experience do you have that would make me believe you have the wherewithal to evaluate their study? Why should I agree they were 'lazy' when it is much more likely that you've simply misunderstood the method, haven't thought on it deeply, and are primarily motivated by your desire to undermine the work to rehabilitate Rice's reputation? That's why I say to accept what learnings are available. You won't be able to undermine the study with others. It says what it says. Other studies -- and the Economist refers to another that uses a similar approach but gets very different results -- might get at different dimensions of the truth. If you have genuine concerns about the methodology, study it enough to understand it so you know how to interpret the results. But your effort to simply dismiss the study just looks like confirmation bias from here.
Texas Women's University +$7009 #45 96th Percentile Heck yeah! Pioneer for life! It's interesting that they don't have any information on UTEP, though...
Sure you can, it just doesn't mean that much unless you've got parents helping pay the rent in overpriced cities like SF or NYC. There are lots of people who don't apply to Rice because they want to live in a hipper place than the job markets that recruit Rice grads. If all you care about is money and getting a job in an exclusive city, you're probably looking to go to a school that will place you in a six figure investment banking job in NYC or a high paying tech firm in Silicon Valley. Rice just isn't that school, and it doesn't want to be that school. The real question is should a person accepted to Rice go to UT Austin or Texas A&M instead?
Not if you want to go into business, or engineering. UT Austin McCombs is a top ranked business school. Rice doesn't even have an undergraduate business school and their MBA program is also a joke. Engineering-wise A&M boasts a really good one, and so does UT. Does Rice have an engineering program?
Rice surprisingly has a ranked MBA program. Rice has an engineering program. Bio engineering program is ranked about top ten.
