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Comment by forgetsusername | Hacker News Reader

>This is obviously wrong.

"The analysis goes against my gut feeling, therefore it's wrong."

Did you bother to read the article?

The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere.

That's what they did, and those were the results. They even say it's debatable. Using a different analysis or metric, the results would be different.

>In summary: Bullshit.

As opposed to the anecdotes regarding your Alma Mater and rich friends.

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I think he has a point, though. This study doesn't seem to control for an incredibly important variable: student interests.

If one school tends to attract students interested in making a lot of money, and another school tends to attract students interested more in academics and graduate school, can one really conclude that the former adds more value? Perhaps, but certainly not without taking into account the different student interests and inclinations towards money-making.

They do control for field of study, but I don't think this is sufficient. A school that attracts a lot of STEM majors who go to graduate school instead of industry is pretty much going to get destroyed in this study.

> Did you bother to read the article?

Yes, I did. In suggesting that their methodology is "debatable", they are indeed hedging their bets. But they are still advancing the theory that, after looking at the data, one could plausibly accept their model.

My "anecdotes" consist of four years as an undergraduate at a university (Rice) rated in the bottom 0.5%. I know damn well that Rice prepared the vast majority of students to be extraordinarily successful in the career paths they chose. I also know that my education was tremendously valuable for its own sake, and that the same was true for my classmates.

And as an academic now teaching at the University of South Carolina, I can only wish that we offered our students what was offered at Rice.

It is true, as a Rice graduate I am biased. But nevertheless I do not believe that I am stretching when assert with confidence that, according to any metric which measures anything worth measuring, Rice lies somewhere in the top 99.5% of universities in the US.

Let's be completely honest, we're all somebody's rich friend on this site.

I think the premise of the analysis is good (at least if you are optimizing for income), but the actual implementation is questionable simply because they don't have access to enough data about the students.

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