WSJ College Rankings 2024 — new approach harsh for NC universities

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
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gtyellowjacket said:
Surprised Davidson is that high if there's a payoff component. That's an expensive school.

I would have thought NC State would have been much higher based on those criteria.
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I'm sure State would score highly if it was mostly engineers and scientists, but they have a ton of liberal arts programs too (that are not considered nearly as prestigious as those similar programs at places like UVA, UNC, etc).
 
BlooVooDoo said:
It’s worse than that. The salary factor isn’t how much graduates earn but how much more they earn than students with similar ACT/SAT scores. So, average students can do well if they get vocational training. This will almost always mean engineering and business programs will come out ahead of those that prepare students for advanced degrees or success in lower-compensated fields like teaching, social work, counseling.
This also explains why HYPSM still ranks highly, but well-regarded schools like duke, Vandy, Rice, NWU, UChicago (75? Really?) and JHU (92!!!) don’t fare as well. Those students have similar test scores to HYPSM, but HYPSM for a variety of reasons, places more graduates at Citadel, Blackrock, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc. If they used family income as a basis to judge how well the college boosted a graduate’s salary it would be a very different ranking.
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So in other words, half of the ranking is basically "the best schools for rich kids to go to if they want to maximize earning potential"
 
gtyellowjacket said:
Very curious about this. I always wanted to give my kids the option for private school but we were really scared of the sticker price. I'm trying to come up with a way to ask a question without asking something that's very personal on an anonymous message board where no one knows who you are.

Maybe it's best if I just say it. Our family makes over 300K but less than 400k. What percentage of the 70k tuition would you guess that we would be paying if we sent our kid there? And if you feel truly anonymous, would love more specifics about the range your family makes and what you ended up paying.
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Sent you a PM
 
336Heel said:
Sent you a PM
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I'm not going to share what he wrote but based on 336's dm, our family will definitely be looking hard at private schools and there's a fair chance we might not even pay half of the sticker price.

He also recommended that you look at the endowment. Elon has no endowment and his kid didn't get much help but Davidson has a big endowment and it was shocking to me how little he ended up paying: less than UNC and 336 is not poor.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
I'm not going to share what he wrote but based on 336's dm, our family will definitely be looking hard at private schools and there's a fair chance we might not even pay half of the sticker price.

He also recommended that you look at the endowment. Elon has no endowment and his kid didn't get much help but Davidson has a big endowment and it was shocking to me how little he ended up paying: less than UNC and 336 is not poor.
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My son got into Elon and he got enough scholarship and other support that it became competitive with UNC. He didn’t end up wanting to go to Elon (too small for him and he had his heart set elsewhere all along), but we were surprised by the amount of support Elon was offering to try to get him to enroll.
 
nycfan said:
Among ACC:

3 Stanford
8 Cal
9 GaT
17 Notre Dame
19 Va Tech
33 UVa
45 dook
59 UNC

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A lot of oddities in these rankings (top 20 includes Babaon College, Bentley, Lehigh, San Jose State and Harvey Mudd College) but having Texas A&M (28) ranked above UVa, dook and UNC (not to mention Texas) throws their entire methodology into question IMO.
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Screw Stanford, Cal and Notre Dame.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
Very curious about this. I always wanted to give my kids the option for private school but we were really scared of the sticker price. I'm trying to come up with a way to ask a question without asking something that's very personal on an anonymous message board where no one knows who you are.

Maybe it's best if I just say it. Our family makes over 300K but less than 400k. What percentage of the 70k tuition would you guess that we would be paying if we sent our kid there? And if you feel truly anonymous, would love more specifics about the range your family makes and what you ended up paying.
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You can run the numbers using each college’s net price calculator (NPC). For a small collection of schools you can try Myintuition. It’s a quick and dirty estimator that works reasonably well for families with typical income streams and assets.
 
Lmao Virginia Tech isn’t even the first or second best school in their own state, much less ahead of UVA or William & Mary.
 
If you have a kid going through the college app process, you are almost certainly looking at college rankings. WSJ looking to disrupt a bit, I imagine. Certainly got us talking about it.
 
nycfan said:
salary impact is 33%
Time to payoff cost is 17%
graduation rate 20%
Learning environment 20% (equal parts opportunities, career prep, facilities, students there recommend going there, character score)
Diversity 10% — half of which is student survey about opportunities to interact with people with different backgrounds the rest split evenly among economic diversity, ethnic diversity and disabilities diversity)


Character score component:
  • Character score (4%): New this year, this measures the extent to which students feel the college has developed character strengths that will help them to make a meaningful contribution to society, including moral courage, hopefulness, resilience, wisdom and a sense of justice, based on our student survey. The questions for this score were developed in collaboration with the Oxford Character Project.
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I wonder how the diversity component breaks out? Did VT benefit by having students from different hollers?
 
There are some WILD swings in today's rankings versus the 2024 rankings.

School.... Rank2024...Rank2025
Florida1583
dook1645
UNC8359
GaT399
Rose-Hulman1798
NJIT19114
BentleyN/A11
San Jose St.17316
Davidson3010
Va Tech7619
 
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