The College Scorecard represents President Obama's effort to answer the question for families of high school graduates about which colleges are worth the expense.
When you ask what college is worth, you are asking a variety of questions from a variety of viewpoints: What is college worth to the individual student? What is college worth to the nation? What is college worth to the nation's economy? What is college worth to business? What is college worth to the professions? What is college worth to the faculty and to the other employees of the college and to the community in which it operates? What, in fact, in the 21st century constitutes a real college?
When you've got college professors from Stanford saying they can offer free on line courses about everything from astrophysics to biology to economics, what they are saying is that college is simply content. If that were true, nobody would have to bother with campuses, dorms, grades, diplomas. If the only concern were imparting knowledge, you'd not need to bother with exams, for that matter. But since the individual student and businesses who hire him/her often need some proof of mastery of content, you need exams.
When you look at the scorecard, you are given the income for a graduate of Harvard or Yale or Brown or the University of Maryland, a single number and you ask, what does this number mean? The quick answer might be it's the annual income 10 years after the first day of freshman year. But, it turns out, like most metrics, it's a number which requires more questions. It's supposed to be the income but it's the income for only students who got government grants in aide during college, which means there's a huge selection bias. And is this the median income or the average income? Not stated. Is this for only people who graduated Harvard or just attended Harvard? If it includes Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and is the average, rather than the median, then the Harvard number could be skewed by those two guys alone. Likely it just looks at one cohort--e.g. the class of 2005.
Here's a sampling:
HARVARD $87,200
GEORGETOWN $ 83,300
STANFORD $80,900
UNIVERSITY MARYLAND BALTIMORE CAMPUS $80,400
DUKE $76,000
PRINCETON $75,000
YALE $66,000
VANDERBILT $60,900
BROWN $59,700
UNIVERSITY MARYLAND COLLEGE PARK $59,100
NYU $58,800
PACE $58,400
HAVERFORD COLLEGE $55,600
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE $49,400
NB: The median income for 28 year olds (college freshman + 10 years) in 2014 was roughly $40,000.
Of course, at 10 years after freshman year, if you are an intern at a prestigious university hospital (which you would be at 10 years), you would be earning between $40-55K and so if Haverford and Swartmore and Brown send a lot of kids to medical school, that would tend to keep that score down.
But as far as the score goes, the college which sends kids to medical school has a low score at 10 years because those kids are just beginning their lowest paid jobs (internship) while the kids from UMBC have been earning for 6 years and have climbed the pay scale at their jobs.
Universities which educate high numbers of engineers all have particularly high ratings--MIT, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon all sport higher scores than Duke. Presumably, this is because engineers start earning money as soon as they graduate and they work their way up the company ladders so by 10 years they are ahead of the doctors, professors and many of the entrepreneurs who graduate from schools below them on list.
The fact is, if you are so unsophisticated you do not understand the difference between what having "Yale" on your resume can mean vs having "UMBC," then the scorecard will not help you. You might say, well, the ivies have been selling snake oil--the scorecard shows you may wind up driving a cab with your Yale degree but you'll become a high paid employee if you go to UMBC.
This is because the private sector is lazy and stupid. Goldman Sacks only interviews at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford (or some cadre like that) because they can. They use the admission committees at those schools to do their selection for them. They get "the best and the brightest" or they convince themselves this is what they get and they take them in, chew them up, spit them out and some remain and prosper. Golman Sacks doesn't care enough about the talent it gets to really assess if there is a better way, because they think they're doing fine with what they are getting.
The other issue about earnings of graduates is whether the above average earnings at 10 years--most elite schools show $60-80 K--has anything to do with the fact those kids had the diploma on the wall or whether it simply is a marker for class distinction. Rich kids from rich families go to expensive, elite schools and graduate not much smarter than when they arrived but their families are connected enough to get them good jobs--that's another equally plausible scenario. Higher earnings reflect class, not college advantage.
The other issue is whether an on line college experience really tells an employer what he wants to know, which in many cases is: Will this kid show up on time, get his work done on time and be pleasant enough to tolerate? Bringing to the workplace command of a specific body of knowledge is not very important in the workplace in many cases. They will teach you what you need to know at the workplace. The question is: how likely are you to show up and play the game. College, almost any rigorous college will certify you can show up and play the game.
As an employer or former employer, a kid who left town to go to college at least had the experience of having "fledged." That is, he left the nest, spread his wings, lived independently from his parents, did his own laundry, got to class, got to the library, handed his work in on time and did not violate enough rules to get thrown out.
From the point of view of the student, 4 years in college may be transformative. It sure was for me. But plenty of my classmates seemed to grow little, if at all. What I got out of college could not have happened at home, on line. Sitting in the office, across the desk from a professor who actually knew his subject in depth, going back in forth, as they do at Oxford, one tutor, one student, getting grilled, no place to go--that was real learning which would be hard to do on line--although with Sykpe, maybe you could.
Simple metrics for complex subjects. Got to love it.
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