College Rankings

Are High College Rankings any Indication of what those Colleges Help their Graduates Make?

If you followed college rankings as a method to choose what college gives you the best opportunity of success in life, you would have to take the Ivy League schools over everything else wouldn’t you? Such an education could open doors for you. Surprisingly, though, a little levelheaded analysis applied to the subject would bring you to a very different kind of conclusion.

On the average, schools with high college rankings usually charge something like $10,000 a year more than what public schools do.

When in-state public colleges actually provide deals that end up costing a third of what any private college does, you do have to wonder. What precisely is it that highly ranked private college offer for all that additional money they charge? Surely, they have fewer students to a teacher, and the colleges have better facilities and great alumni networks that give their graduates a great foot in the door when they try to get a job. However, that’s not actually what matters in life. What people imagine Ivy League colleges will do for them is, they imagine that they’ll give them better jobs and better salaries. Are great college rankings a reasonable way in which to make sure that you land better jobs and better salaries?

Socially-minded observers of the education scene actually believe that public school might take the honors when it refers ensuring better jobs and salaries for graduates. The thing is, you land up paying so much in fees and related costs at the great expensive name brand colleges that your net income, when you deduct the cost of your education there from what you get to make through your working life, doesn’t really end up being much. On the other hand, state universities and other no-name places where you can get a good education cost so little that finally, you end up keeping so much more of what you make through life. In absolute terms, what you get to make with a Harvard degree may be great; but when you factor in the costs involved in getting a degree, your income over your working life just does not come anywhere near what you stand to make getting well a cheaper degree.

Most young high school graduates go to college because they hope to be able to make a better paycheck. Having a huge unpaid student loan to have to balance for years makes the whole chase after high college rankings a waste of time. Study after study finds that if you balance the cost of what you invest in your college against what you end up making through life, the private colleges are not even in the top 20.

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