Harvard, Columbia Top WSJ/THE's College Rankings
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Your Money Matters. I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. The Wall Street Journal Times Higher Education College rankings are out, and they show that while Silicon Valley and the Sun Belt get a lot of attention, the spotlight still shines bright on colleges and universities in the Northeast. And the Wall Street Journal's Doug Belkin joins us to discuss.
How are the WSJ/Times Higher Education college rankings assembled and weighted?
So, Doug, let's start with how the rankings are assembled. Can you take us through that briefly?
Sure. The way the rankings are designed is to give folks who are looking at where to go to school a sense of the kind of outcomes that they're likely to get if they attend and graduate from a specific school. So about 40% of the rankings weight salaries after graduation, along with things like graduation rates and the ability to repay loans.
Why does the rankings' emphasis on post-graduation earnings matter?
So that's the That sets the journal's ranking apart a little bit from most rankings, which are more concerned with inputs, the relative success of the incoming student body, as well as the campus, the amenities that the campus has. Those are generally more heavily weighted in typical college rankings.
So for the journal figures, we're looking at how well it prepares students to head out to the real world.
Yeah. What's the value that you're going to receive from an education at a specific school? How will that value translate into a paycheck and into other aspects of your life once you're done?
And I guess it wasn't a surprise that Harvard University came out on top.
What gives Harvard and other Northeast schools an advantage in these rankings?
So the old established moneyed schools in the Northeast have a tremendous advantage because they are old established moneyed schools. Harvard has a tremendous endowment, and that gives us a huge amount of power to pay great teachers and to keep student-faculty ratios very low. And it gives them, of course, just a lot of connections and prestige that are connected with old universities like this, which open doors for the students there while they're students and then after they graduate.
And there were other schools in the caliber of Harvard in the top 10 also. MIT was up there and also Yale was up there as well.
Right. So, you know, one of the notable findings was that top 10 schools in the U.S., seven or eight of them were within 400 miles of Harvard. of Harvard Square, so Columbia ranked very well. And then Stanford and Duke were the ones that were sort of farther away that also cracked that list.
And you had a couple of surprises there. I mean, how many of us could find Siena College on a map? And that shows up.
Which surprising smaller colleges scored well and why did they stand out?
Well, so the school is... The rankings break out different aspects. And there was also a series of survey questions that the rankings take into account. And those ask things like whether student bodies, classmates are inspiring, whether or not they had good interactions with faculty. So lesser well-known schools did very well in specific categories across the rankings.
How do the rankings use student background data like family income and SATs?
And just to make a note, Siena College is in Albany County in the Capital District in New York State. We're speaking with The Wall Street Journal's Doug Belkin about The Wall Street Journal Times Higher Education College Rankings. And you're listening to Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening, everyone. Now, Doug, when the data is compiled for the college rankings, figures such as family income and SAT scores are used.
Yeah. So in order to figure out what the added value is of a university education to prospective earnings, we take the amount of money that a family earns, the household income, and we look at things like SAT scores to make a prediction about what that student is likely to earn after a college degree. And then we compare that with what students are actually earning. Now, the data for the actual earnings is somewhat limited because to the kids who take out federal student loans because we can tell how much they're earning 10 years after they enter school. So we can compare that data point with this predictive
So the way the Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education College assemble these rankings and show us how well the schools prepare the students for the real world, they're dealing with an economy.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:29
2
How are the WSJ/Times Higher Education college rankings assembled and weighted?
0:29–1:01
3
Why does the rankings' emphasis on post-graduation earnings matter?
1:01–1:43
4
What gives Harvard and other Northeast schools an advantage in these rankings?
1:43–2:47
5
Which surprising smaller colleges scored well and why did they stand out?
2:47–3:11
6
How do the rankings use student background data like family income and SATs?
3:11–4:38
7
How should families use these rankings when considering college choices?
4:38–5:55
Speakers
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