How We Selected Our List of Eligible Schools
Choosing a college is a big decision.
Your college experience will be one of the most transformative periods in your life as well as one of your most significant investments. Therefore, choosing a college that provides a high quality education and prepares you for a fulfilling career is crucially important.
When it comes to evaluating colleges, how do we define quality?
Not surprisingly, a variety of metrics have been invented to answer this question, and they mostly fall into two categories: measures of input quality and measures of outcome quality. To understand the difference, consider how you might evaluate a pizza. On one hand, there are the inputs: flour, tomatoes, cheese, etc. On the other hand, there is the outcome: a pizza, which is either to your liking, or not. While high quality ingredients are worthy of consideration, they do not define quality any more than flour, tomatoes and cheese define a pizza. Clearly, it’s the value added to the raw ingredients that is most closely associated with the definition of quality.
Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of sampling colleges the way we sample pizzas. We are forced to rely on data collected by others in making our quality assessment. The good news is that there is a wealth of information available to prospective students to help with the analysis. The most popular college ranking system was created more than 40 years ago by US News & World Report. The USNWR methodology heavily weights inputs such as SAT/ACT scores, high school class ranks, class sizes, details about faculty, and spending per student. It places less weight on outcomes such as the percentage of students who graduate, their employment status, and their earnings. In short, the USNWR approach makes the assumption that if the inputs are of high quality then the college must be of high quality. However, because inputs can be controlled, the USNWR list has attracted criticism for providing incentives for colleges and universities to manipulate the data in order to improve their ranking without necessarily improving the quality of their education.
Concerns surrounding the accuracy of input-based measures of college quality combined with the soaring cost of college tuition prompted the Dependent of Education in 2015 to create the College Scorecard. The Scorecard is a publicly available database of information on virtually every college and university in the United States. It allows students and their families to compare schools based on a variety of metrics including, most importantly, outcomes. Simply put, the College Scorecard begins with a database of over 11 million college graduates and links each individual’s income, according to the IRS, with the college or university they attended. This data is then aggregated for each of more than 5,000 colleges and universities, thereby providing insight into the average earnings of each school’s graduates up to 10 years after they receive their degree. The idea underpinning this approach is that college quality is defined by an institution’s ability to provide its students with the knowledge and skills to successfully pursue rewarding careers, and that this ability is manifested in the long term earnings of its graduates. Although not all individuals necessarily wish to pursue high paying careers after receiving their degree, it is an inescapable fact that college is not free, and the cost of attending a school of higher learning must ultimately be paid back through earnings.
Using the College Scorecard database as a launching point, researchers have developed new ranking systems that not only focus on outcomes, but compare outcomes with the cost of tuition. Think of this approach as measuring college quality in terms of return on investment. Systems that embrace this methodology have been developed by The Center of Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University (CEW) and by Michael Itzkowitz of Third Way.
The CEW model works by deducting a college’s tuition cost from the average expected future earnings of graduates from that college to arrive at a “Net Present Value” score.
The Itzkowitz approach estimates future earnings in excess of what a person with a high school degree would earn and divides these “excess earnings” into the cost of tuition. This “payback score” represents the number of years of excess earnings that are required to pay back the cost of attending a particular college.
Not surprisingly, because the CEW and Itzkowitz systems rely on outcomes and incorporate tuition cost, the college rankings they produce are different from the USNWR list. As is the case with pizzas, input quality is not necessarily indicative of outcome quality.
Of course, despite the great effort that has gone into defining and measuring college quality, there is not necessarily a right answer. In the end, it is up to you to decide – based on your preferences, interests, and aptitudes – what school is the best fit.
The Barnesville Scholarship Fund embraces the view that college quality is best assessed by considering outcomes relative to cost. Accordingly, our list of eligible schools represents what we believe are the top colleges and universities based on a blend of scores from CEW and Itzkowitz. This is not meant to imply that other schools don’t provide a good education and good outcomes, but rather that, in an environment of skyrocketing tuition costs, schools that can demonstrate an ability to deliver consistently good outcomes in return for the price they charge deserve special recognition. Of course, over time, a school’s quality can change, and as new data becomes available, our list will be updated. At this time, we are offering scholarship support at 80 excellent schools located across the United States.
Other Resources
The 10 highest-paying college majors, five years after graduation - CNBC
The College Rankings Rebellion of U.S. News and World Report’s Annual List - The Week
The 2024 Best Colleges in the U.S.: Princeton, MIT and Yale Take Top Spots - WSJ
If You Didn’t Get Into an Ivy League, a Public School Is the Better Investment - Bloomberg
That Giant College ‘Sticker’ Price Isn’t What Most Students Pay - New York Times