The New York Times: “Earnings data are finding their way into a proliferating number of mainstream college rankings, shifting the competitive landscape of American higher education in often surprising ways. This fall, The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education … introduced their first college rankings. Forty percent of their result is measures of ‘outcomes’ — earnings, graduation rate and loan repayment rate.”
“Last year The Economist released its first college rankings, and it relies even more heavily on earnings data … The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has issued another set of rankings, adjusting the College Scorecard salary rankings first for choice of major … and yet another ranking that assesses students’ expected earnings, given their characteristics when they entered college, to the actual outcome … Both Forbes and Money magazines, in their rankings, incorporate PayScale data on earnings.”
“It should go without saying that the value of an education should never be reduced to purely monetary terms.” Phil Baty of Times Higher Education comments: “The success of a college graduate should not be measured purely in terms of the salaries they earn. There’s more to life than a high salary. This is why we’ve also put an emphasis on how much the student is intellectually engaged, stimulated and stretched by their college education.”
