The Best US Colleges, Based on Alumni Salary

Because college is so expensive, choosing which on to go to for yourself or your kids is a very big deal. A new study ranks two- and four-year colleges by how much each college probably increased its students’ earnings.

Brookings Institution explains how its “value-added” analysis works:

Drawing on government and private sources, this report analyzes college “value-added,” the difference between actual alumni outcomes (like salaries) and the outcomes one would expect given a student’s characteristics and the type of institution. Value-added captures the benefits that accrue from aspects of college quality we can measure, such as graduation rates and the market value of the skills a college teaches, as well as aspects we can’t.

The value-added measures introduced here improve on conventional rankings in several ways. They are available for a much larger number of schools; they focus on the factors that best predict measurable economic outcomes; and they attempt to isolate the effect colleges themselves have on those outcomes, above and beyond what students’ backgrounds would predict.

In other words, they compare colleges on how much they correlate to students’ increased income mobility. You might be more likely to earn more by studying English or Physics at one university versus another, due to factors like the school’s career prep or focus on marketable skills.

It probably comes as no surprise that STEM-focused colleges are at the top of the four-year list—Caltech, MIT, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology—since jobs in these fields tend to have higher earnings. But there are others on the list you might not have heard of or aren’t tech-concentrated.

Check out the link below to compare colleges or see how your school ranked.

Beyond College Rankings | Brookings via Marginal Revolution

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