Georgetown beats out Ivies in new college rankings

For those Hoyas who see the college experience, and the Georgetown adventure specifically, on a cost-benefit ratio, there’s some good news for you!

In their first ever list of college rankings, The Economist came up with a novel way of ranking the colleges and universities which shakes up the traditional hierarchy of prestige.

Sure, Harvard comes in fourth, but the only other Ivy to be found in the first 200 universities listed is UPenn, at 15th.

Georgetown University finds itself snugly placed as a stellar 16th-best valued educational institution.

The rankings are however, completely unconventional, not only because we find the little known Washington and Lee University at the top of the table, but also because the metrics used are purely economic.

The Economist pored over the trove of data released on September 12th by the Department of Education’s “college scorecard” website and decided to create a college ranking that truly quantified which institutions actually helped their students earn more.

Their idea was that the economic value of a university is intrinsically tied to the gap that alumni earn after graduating against the amount they might have made by studying elsewhere.

So they came up with a formula that weighs test scores, majors, state wealth, even religious affiliation and many other factors, which is aggregated into an anticipated median wage for alumni of each school 10 years after graduation.

After comparing these with the actual median wages of graduates 10 years later, the highest-ranking colleges and universities were those that outperformed expectations the most.

Although this new ranking system seems simple and effective, The Economist notes that there are definite downsides. To start, the data only includes those students who applied for federal financial aid. This seems like it could be a large population within the United States, however, it excludes students who come from a background of financial comfort.

And it only takes into account the students’ jobs for up to ten years. Students will not be receiving the apex of their income directly after college, so this mechanism disregards the potential growth that students’ salaries irrefutably experience. Also, those students who decide to go on to graduate school are not properly accounted for. So long as they’re still studying, they get labeled as being less economically productive in those ten years, even if that often gets made up in the long run.

In addition to that, there are some colleges who are seen to be underperforming, but many of these institutions are for students with handicaps (deaf, blind, etc.) They aren’t necessarily underperforming – it is simply much harder for a student with such impairments to attain a job after graduation, let alone one that pays equally compared to a non-handicapped peer.

There are many schools that do not appear at the top of the list, and are conspicuously absent: Princeton, Columbia, and UC Berkeley, among others.

This isn’t due to a lack of performance, but rather to the fact that many of the students graduating from these universities go on to work in the public sector – and we all know that the grass is greener in the private sector. Even though these students may have just as great, if not greater, impact on society, they are seen as burdens from this fiscal paradigm.

In any case, it’s nice to live in a world where Hoyas are 1,254 spots ahead of Yale.