Duke trounces Ivy League in new college rankings

The Economist recently came out with their first ever college rankings, because according to them, rankings like Forbes and US News “do not measure how much the universities help their students, but rather what type of students choose to attend their universities.”

Duke came in at #29, beating out Yale, Princeton, and a variety of other Ivies by hundreds.

The Economist approached ranking in a new and, what they view as a more affective, style. The economic value of the education received at each university is determined by economic value of an institution, which is the gap between the earnings of graduates and former students and how much they were likely to make if they attended a different university.

The Economist also looked at test scores, religious affiliation, majors, state wealth, etc.

Duke students over perform, on average, by $7,807.

Surprisingly, Washington and Lee University ranked first out of the 1,275 four-year, non-vocational schools assessed, over performing by about $22,377.

Not so fortunate to be up top is dear old UNC Chapel Hill, finding itself comfy at 995.

UNC is accompanied down there by Yale at 1270, and Brown at 1127.

How can these schools, normally comfortably in the top 20 most competitive schools in the nation, find themselves seated behind universities with acceptance rates over 50 percent?

In the 2016 US News National Universities listing Duke came in as the 8th best school in the nation.

This is not to seem pretentious, I am just baffled by the numbers- no wonder I am a humanities major.

So why are the top universities in the country being so out performed? How is our logic in what makes a good university being changed? Why are we so desperate to go to Ivies and places like Duke, when, according to the Economist, we could get a more valuable education elsewhere?

And then we discovered the loop: how colleges are scaled.

The Economist only looked at the ten years post graduation. This puts a damper on students pursuing higher education in graduate school, especially obstructing universities with high percentages of students continuing on to medical school.

The Economist also only looks at people who applied to federal financial aid, excluding those from better means.

The Economist notes their analysis does “suffer from limitations.”

What I presume to be the biggest flaw with this analysis is the inability to account for the percentages of students from certain institutions going into public service. There are certain schools with much higher tendencies to go into public service work and they should not be marked as “underperforming.”

The economist is not valuing the importance of contributing to American society, rather they are basing success simply off of economic values.

Though lower than some of our other rankings it is still impressive we have have come in above so many other institutions, especially with the number of graduates going on to business school, law school, medical school, and into public service.

It is also a nice little boost to be 966 places ahead of UNC.