
With Website to Research Colleges, Obama Abandons Ranking System - dctoedt
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/with-website-to-research-colleges-obama-abandons-ranking-system.html
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yeukhon
The Salary After Attending seems really really surprising. Take
[https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/?degree=b&major=engin...](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/?degree=b&major=engineering&sort=salary:desc)
this. After 10 years, median for 10 years is only $91,600 for MIT. Cornell &
Columbia are already on the second page aabout 72,000. I can't even find where
UCBerkely is. In fact, this is the median for all programs. The filter is
merely to filter out schools that may not offer Engineering program, and
that's a poor user experience and is giving false impression.

Also, does government make Computer Science in the Engineering category, or
the Computer & Information Science?

The rating cards could be useful for really really poor institutions.

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skybrian
Making the underlying data available for others to use might be the best thing
to come out of this. It's not like there's only one way to build a ranking
system.

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ericclemmons
You're absolutely right. Being in the Higher Education space, dealing with
IPEDS and most of the gov't supplied data is abysmal.

18F seems to have cleaned it up significantly.

What's most problematic, IMO, is seeing users choose expensive career paths
that's marginally better than their current situation.

This tool and data don't directly answer that, but it's a huge step forward
compared to what I've dealt with.

Now if more college-seekers actually looked up this info...

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revelation
Interesting how something that was intended to weed out bad colleges ended up
as a tool to sell college on yet more people, with useless individual bar
graphs for "comparing" schools.

It's like putting warning labels on cigarettes, you would be hard pressed to
find any individual that is not either in favor or indifferent to doing that,
yet this kind of initiative consistently fails to become law or ends up being
neutered like this program.

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droithomme
Yes, that is interesting. I found it also quite interesting that when you look
at their link to yearly cost to attend numbers, such as on the list "23 four-
year schools with low costs that lead to high incomes"
([http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/09/schools-with-low-costs-and-
hi...](http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/09/schools-with-low-costs-and-high-
incomes/)) they are given as net costs, for the lowest income students only,
and after deducting both federal grants _and loans_. The loans have to be
repaid so not including those in the "cost" of college is strange.

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hugh4
Sounds like typical government modus operandi. Provide a service which is
already provided by about eighteen private organisations
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_ranking...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_rankings))
and do it worse.

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toomuchtodo
Any chance you could withhold comments that provide no value to the
discussion?

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hugh4
Okay, let me rephrase.

Does this new service provide any value which isn't already being provided by
a large number of private organisations?

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toomuchtodo
I don't believe that's the right question.

The question is: Can the government provide this service more effectively
(better, cheaper, faster, without bias) than private organizations. I'd argue
the answer to that is "yes", very similarly to how the Obama administration
cut private banks out of student loan funding [+].

Where you see the possibility of failure, I see opportunity for both success
in the mission and more transparency. I can FOIA a federal government entity;
I cannot do the same for a corporation.

[+]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/education/11educ.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/education/11educ.html)

~~~
hugh4
But the other rankings are modest side projects for entities whose main
business is elsewhere -- eg the Times Higher Education Supplement which
probably has the best ranking. It also has the nice point of covering the
world instead of just one country.

And how good can rankings get, anyway? There's always a huge error bar, so
being the 20th best vs the 40th best institution is meaningless. All the
rankings tell us that Harvard and MIT and Stanford are very good and some
place you've never heard of us rubbish.

