How We Selected Our List of Eligible Schools
Choosing a college is a big decision.
Your college experience will be one of the most transformative periods in your life as well as one of your most significant investments. Therefore, choosing a college that provides a high quality education and prepares you for a fulfilling career is crucially important.
When it comes to evaluating colleges, how do we define quality?
Not surprisingly, a variety of metrics have been invented to answer this question, and they mostly fall into two categories: measures of input quality and measures of outcome quality. To understand the difference, consider how you might evaluate a pizza. On one hand, there are the inputs: flour, tomatoes, cheese, etc. On the other hand, there is the outcome: a pizza, which is either to your liking, or not. While high quality ingredients are worthy of consideration, they do not define quality any more than flour, tomatoes and cheese define a pizza. Clearly, it’s the value added to the raw ingredients that is most closely associated with the definition of quality.
Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of sampling colleges the way we sample pizzas. We are forced to rely on data collected by others in making our quality assessment. The good news is that there is a wealth of information available to prospective students to help with the analysis. The most popular college ranking system was created more than 40 years ago by US News & World Report. The USNWR methodology heavily weights inputs such as SAT/ACT scores, high school class ranks, class sizes, details about faculty, and spending per student. It places less weight on outcomes such as the percentage of students who graduate, their employment status, and their earnings. In short, the USNWR approach makes the assumption that if the inputs are of high quality then the college must be of high quality. However, because inputs can be controlled, the USNWR list has attracted criticism for providing incentives for colleges and universities to manipulate the data in order to improve their ranking without necessarily improving the quality of their education.
Concerns surrounding the accuracy of input-based measures of college quality combined with the soaring cost of college tuition prompted the Dependent of Education in 2015 to create the College Scorecard. The Scorecard is a publicly available database of information on virtually every college and university in the United States. It allows students and their families to compare schools based on a variety of metrics including, most importantly, outcomes. Simply put, the College Scorecard begins with a database of over 11 million college graduates and links each individual’s income, according to the IRS, with the college or university they attended. This data is then aggregated for each of more than 5,000 colleges and universities, thereby providing insight into the average earnings of each school’s graduates up to 10 years after they receive their degree. The idea underpinning this approach is that college quality is defined by an institution’s ability to provide its students with the knowledge and skills to successfully pursue rewarding careers, and that this ability is manifested in the long term earnings of its graduates. Although not all individuals necessarily wish to pursue high paying careers after receiving their degree, it is an inescapable fact that college is not free, and the cost of attending a school of higher learning must ultimately be paid back through earnings.
Using the College Scorecard database as a launching point, and leaning on concepts from well-regarded researchers at Georgetown and Third Way, The Barnesville Scholarship Fund created a “Payback Score” as a proxy to determine which colleges are worth the cost to attend. We calculated the “costs of college”, and then divided this by the “incremental annual earnings” from a college degree to determine how many years it would take to pay back the cost of a 4-year ppst-secondary education. The methodology included:
Costs of College:
College Costs: College Scorecard provides the average net price to attend each school. This includes tuition and fees, books and supplies, and living expenses, minus the average grant and scholarship aid. We multiplied this annual net price by four to calculate the average cost to attend each school.
Foregone Salary: U.S. Census provides data on the median earnings for high school graduates by state. We assumed that to attend college from Barnesville, Ohio, a student would forgo these earnings for four years. Thus, this missed opportunity is added to the “cost” of choosing to attend college.
Incremental Annual Earnings:
Median Earnings of a College Graduate: College Scorecard provides the median earnings for students working and not enrolled 10 years after entry into a college.
Median Earnings of a High-School Graduate: While one could calculate a payback score based just on the earnings of a college graduate, it is important to back out the earnings one could have expected without the college degree. Therefore, we subtracted the median annual earnings of a high-school graduate in Ohio (according to U.S. Census data), to determine the “incremental annual earnings”.
This methodology yielded a list of 109 public and non-profit schools with a payback score of 6 years or less and a graduation rate of more than 60%. This is not meant to imply that other schools don’t provide a good education and good outcomes, but rather that, in an environment of skyrocketing tuition costs, schools that can demonstrate an ability to deliver consistently good outcomes in return for the price they charge deserve special recognition. Of course, over time, a school’s quality can change, and as new data becomes available, our list will be updated. At this time, we are offering scholarship support for Barnesville area high school graduates who choose to attend any of these excellent public and non-profit schools located throughout the United States.
Other Resources
The 10 highest-paying college majors, five years after graduation - CNBC
The College Rankings Rebellion of U.S. News and World Report’s Annual List - The Week
The 2024 Best Colleges in the U.S.: Princeton, MIT and Yale Take Top Spots - WSJ
If You Didn’t Get Into an Ivy League, a Public School Is the Better Investment - Bloomberg
That Giant College ‘Sticker’ Price Isn’t What Most Students Pay - New York Times
The Colleges Where You're Most Likely to Have a Positive Return on Your Investment - WSJ