The Economist ranks Dartmouth 443rd, hundreds behind other Ivies

The craze surrounding American colleges seems to be ever rising. Tuition continues to rise (sorry Bernie), for some, preparations for the SAT and ACT start in the midst of middle school, and it is not uncommon to apply for 20+ colleges, feeding money into the already tedious Common App, all for the small chance of scoring a top tier institution.

It is not surprising then that ranking after ranking, by the likes of US News and Forbes, is released to “help” the public choose which colleges are the national top picks. However, these are often strewn with misinformation and based on not complete research, leaving readers with no clearer of a choice as before.

So when The Economist released its first ever college ranking, adding to the already overflowing slew of stats for the public to comb through, it’s natural to question what is different this time around – especially when Dartmouth is placed at a measly 443rd in the nation, compared to Harvard at 4th, but not as low as Princeton at 772nd.

“The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates and former students earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere.”

However, though it is not immediately apparent, The Economist’s findings actually give very little accurate information on this matter. After you swim through paragraphs of text where they explain their process, you begin to realize there are holes in their ranking.

For example, the survey leans strongly towards colleges that place emphasis on engineering and other lucrative professions. In The Economist’s own words:

“[The ranking’s] upper tiers are dominated by colleges that emphasize engineering (such as Worcester Polytechnic) and attract students with high SAT scores (like Stanford). The lower extreme is populated by religious and art-focused colleges, particularly those in the south and Midwest.”

While this in itself is not a problematic finding, it diminishes the overall benefits of attending a liberal arts college – simply reducing a college’s appeal to only the monetary gain of its alumni after graduation.

Again, this is fine, maybe limited view of the college system. However, The Economist falters towards the end of its article when it describes the demographic observed from the 1275 institutions that were surveyed:

“(The scorecards) only include individuals who applied for federal financial aid, restricting the sample to a highly unrepresentative subset of students that leaves out the children of most well-off parents. And they only track students’ salaries for ten years after they start college, cutting off their trajectory at an age when many eventual high earners are still in graduate school and thus excluded from the sample of incomes. A college that produces hordes of future doctors will have far lower listed earnings in the database than one that generates throngs of, say, financial advisors, even though the two groups’ incomes are likely to converge in their 30s.”

While it’s great that The Economist is aware of the limitations of their ranking, it begs the questions as to why further research wasn’t conducted in order to give a fuller representation of the college system.

As it is right now, the rankings are only helpful “for students who want to know which colleges are likely to boost their future salaries by the greatest amount, given their qualifications and preferences regarding career and location.” Furthermore, as seen above, this information is solely based off a very small portion of society.

Therefore, the rankings are reduced to a representation of highest monetary gain from expected earnings (which explains why Washington and Lee University is ranked #1 with a starting salary $10,000 lower than Dartmouth, but with a $22,377 salary raise on current median earnings), based off of limited data.

So while Dartmouth may rank low on The Economist’s new rankings, the findings are inconclusive and should be slotted away with the countless other college rankings that do not give a fully truthful representation of the American College system.