The New York Times has unveiled a new build-your-own college ranking tool that allows consumers to construct their own customized college rankings based on the characteristics that matter the most to them rather than the predetermined set of criteria that existing ranking systems rely upon.
The interactive tool, which can be found here, was designed by Times Opinion staff using data from these public sources: the National Center for Education Statistics, the College Scorecard, Niche.com, and Opportunity Insights.
The tool’s database contains 900 four-year U.S. colleges and universities meeting two criteria: enrolled at least 500 students and graduated more than 50% of their students within eight years. The latter requirement eliminated hundreds of schools from the list, an exclusion that the Times defends because of what it rightly identifies as the serious problem of high college dropout rates.
The database also includes only those schools where more than 75% of students were attending full-time and that had data for at least three of the ten measures the Times used for the rankings (see below). Military colleges, maritime colleges, federal service academies, special focus colleges and online universities were also excluded.
The tool allows students and their families to weight the importance of these ten criteria as they search for the colleges that best suit their unique interests:
- Earnings – the median income of people who attended the school ten years earlier and who had received federal aid
- Sticker price – the published tuition and fees charged by a college
- Net price – the price students actually pay after receiving scholarships and financial aid
- Economic mobility – a measure using a 2017 analysis by Opportunity Insights that shows the probability that a student from a family in the bottom 40% of household income would eventually reach the top 40%
- Economic diversity uses the same data to derive an index that shows the proportion of the student body who come from each quintile of household income
- Academic profile – a composite score based on standardized test scores (SAT and ACT), graduation rates, and student-faculty ratio
- Racial diversity – an index based on the racial composition of the undergraduate population
- Campus safety, Party scene and Athletics – these scores are based on self-reported student surveys provided by Niche.com.
The tool allows users to assign whatever weight they choose – ranging from 0 to 100 – to each of these ten factors. It then calculates a ranking based on that unique set of weights.
It also allows the results to be filtered by the size of institution a student prefers to attend, its location, and an assortment of other factors such as whether the school is public or private, whether it has a religious orientation or not, whether it emphasizes STEM degrees or humanities majors, or whether its students are all men or all women.
Here are a few examples of the different rankings depending on how much weight is assigned to the various criteria:
Take a student for whom the only thing that matters is a school’s academic profile. That factor would be assigned a weight of 100, while all the other factors would have weights set to 0. Here are the top five schools, unfiltered by any other factor like size or location:
- California Institute of Technology (CIT)
- Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT)
- University of Chicago
- Princeton University
- Duke University
What about a student who cares only about low net price? The top five colleges turn out to all be part of the City University of New York:
- CUNY Hunter College
- CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College
- CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice
- CUNY City College
- CUNY Brooklyn College
How about a student who weights two factors equally – earnings and racial diversity? The top five schools would be:
- MIT
- Harvey Mudd College
- CIT
- University of Pennsylvania
- Stanford University
What if you want to go to a college in the South and assign equal weights to two criteria: lowest sticker price and graduates with the highest earnings ten years after college. Here are the top five:
- Georgina Institute of Technology
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
- University of Virginia
- University of Florida
- University of Texas, Austin
To what extent the NYT’s new ranking alternative will displace other systems remains to be seen. But one thing it should do is encourage students to think more seriously about what matters to them when choosing a college – which subjects hold the greatest interest, how important is campus diversity, or how valued is a lively social scene or a winning football team.
The Times new tool will offer a particularly valuable service to students, if, as Frank Bruni wrote in an accompanying essay, it encourages them “to pause, reflect deeply on what sort of experience they truly want, factor in what’s logistically and financially realistic for them and consider a list of colleges assembled along those lines, with fuzzy and subjective metrics like prestige eliminated from the equation.”
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