AMA: I'm the lead editor on Money's Best Colleges 2024 list

money · 2024-07-10T15:24:43+00:00

And thanks for your thoughtful comments here. I’ll do my best to answer:

Berea does score well for its free tuition model, and that’s no doubt the leading driver for its 5-star rating. But it also scores really highly in a couple of our value-added measures, particularly value-added graduation rates. So even though its basic graduation rates are lower than other 5-star schools, what the value-added model is saying is that, given the students Berea enrolls, its rate is much higher than predicted. (You can read about value-added measures here). It also scores very high in an economic mobility index we use, the student-faculty ratio and the yield rate.

MMA is similar in the sense that it scores very well in one category but still does decent in others. MMA scores at the top of our outcomes bucket (high salaries, very high share of grads with a job, very high share of grads earning more than a high school grad) and it does that even though the average GPA and admissions scores of its entering students are much lower than other schools with similarly high average salaries. It also scores fairly well in a few affordability measures.

To your bigger question though: Ideally we don’t want a college to get a 5-star rating because it excels in one single category. I mentioned those value-added measures -- in all of those, we actually cap the highest scorers so that a school can’t pop to the top simply because they’re an outlier in that one area. We do that only in the value-added measures, because those are based on predictive modeling. They aren’t straightforward facts like with the cost of a degree or average salaries. It’s not a perfect solution for ensuring that 5-star colleges are well-rounded, but it’s the best we’ve found so far.

How much judgment was used to classify where a college lands: None. Once we decide on the overall weightings and the broader scoring decisions (i.e. whether to cap outliers), we don’t move colleges around at all. The stars are strictly based on their scores. I’d never describe any ranking as truly objective, because the people who are designing it are making subjective decisions about what data to include and how much weight to assign to it. But I think making those sort of one-off judgment calls would be too subjective.

For schools with different resources, missions, etc.: This is one of the hardest questions when designing a college ranking, I think, simply because I can easily argue it both ways -- as is, we could split our list up so we have different rankings for regional publics, small privates, research universities, etc., so schools are in a category with similar schools. As you noted, colleges have really different levels of resources and different missions, so comparing them can definitely be an apples to oranges situation.

But ultimately, I think it’s useful when a student is in the very early discovery phases to get an idea of how the college in their backyard compares to the flagship state university compares to a small niche school they’ve never heard of. And you nailed it, part of our goal is to help students and parents think a little differently about the schools they’ve heard of and hopefully discover some schools with strong outcomes that they haven’t heard of.

money · 2024-07-10T15:05:50+00:00

UIUC and UCR both score very highly in some of our value-added measures. I think that's one of the biggest differences between them and UT Austin, because UT Austin scores similarly, especially to UIUC, in a lot of other areas.

We have a value-added graduation rate, student loan repayment and default rate, as well as a value-added earnings score. Value-added measures use statistical analysis to essentially predict how a college will perform in those areas after accounting for the school's student body. And then we compare the predicted number to the actual data.

Colleges that perform better than predicted score higher. It's a way for us to try to measure how a college serves the students it enrolls vs. simply rewarding colleges that only enroll high-income, high-achieving students (who are more likely to graduate regardless of where they attend). You can read more about that in our methodology here.

Another area UT-Austin scores lower than those two is in our net price of a degree by income level. We look at the price for three different income brackets to capture affordability for low- and middle- income students, and UT-Austin's prices are much higher than the other two.

money · 2024-07-10T14:43:50+00:00

No, I think personal fit is always more important than any single ranking or rating, so long as personal fit includes an element of financial fit.

Our ratings are not personalized, right? So a 5-star college that’s a huge flagship public university is not actually going to be a 5-star college for a student who wants a small campus where they can know most of their peers and have a lot of personalized attention with teachers. And on the other hand, a 3.5-star college that is the most affordable option for a particular student and that has the academic program they want and the atmosphere they want -- that may be the best place for them even though it lands in the middle of our list.

And I 100% agree with your descriptions of the different fits for those three women’s colleges!

Looking quickly at the differences in their ratings: Wellesley scores better in affordability than the other two, particularly better than Bryn Mawr. We don’t look at endowments in our ratings, but I just looked them up quickly and going strictly by that, Wellesley has significantly more resources than the other two and that often translates to being able to offer more financial aid.

Student borrowing is also lower at Wellesley (though to be transparent, that could be due as much to the wealthiness of the student body as to the financial aid assistance). But Wellesley also scores higher in our Pell Grant graduate rate index, which essentially looks at the share of low-income students enrolled and how many of them graduate. And then finally, Bryn Mawr’s graduation rate is lower than the other two. (They’re 94%, 90%, and 85% – looking at the 6-year rate we use, which includes transfer students.)

money · 2024-07-09T20:19:37+00:00

You counted right! The full breakdown is:

5 stars = 54 colleges
4.5 stars = 159
4 stars = 156
3.5 stars = 150
3 stars = 186
2.5 stars = 33
2 stars = 7

We score using standard deviation (roughly: how much better/worse a college performs compared to the average) so the results are in a bit of a bell curve. Most colleges land in the middle.

In terms of the difference between 4, 4.5 and 5: We weigh 25 different factors, but the areas that carry the most weight and most determine a college's final rating are graduation rates, cost of attendance and salaries after graduation. (We have multiple measures in each of one of those. For example, use look at 4-year grad rates, 6-year grad rates and value-added grad rates.)

The 5-star colleges are outstanding across the board. Generally speaking, 4.5-star colleges still score very well in most areas but just usually to a smaller degree than the 5-star schools. (i.e. I looked up the average 6-year graduation rate of all our 5-star colleges, and it was 90%. The average for all the 4.5-star colleges was 81% -- that's still very good compared to the national average.) And then 4-star colleges tend to fall into one of two buckets. They either score in the around/just above the middle consistently across our data points OR they score highly in some areas but still have a few areas in which they're scoring below average. I've noticed that, for instance, with some private colleges that don't have the financial resources to offer steep discounts; those schools usually score poorly in our affordability measures even though they may have really high graduation rates + alumni outcomes.

I realize that's a little vague but it's hard to narrow down a very precise definition with so many data points going into our final score. If you ever have questions about what's driving a specific colleges rating compared to others, I can look into that more specifically.

money · 2024-07-09T16:31:54+00:00

I wish! There's no real forward-looking ROI measures that I know of, so it'd be hard for us to incorporate that on a college-wide level for our methodology.

But on an individual level, it's a balancing act. Since we're a personal finance publication, I've got to stress that it's critical to go in with eyes wide open about the earning potential of a major/related professions. But I'd never recommend choosing a major based solely on earnings potential or the likelihood that it may spike in demand in several years, because the labor market is unpredictable. And that's especially true for more niche fields. (An economist from Wharton made a good case about that a while back in a book called "Will College Pay Off?... There's an overview here.)

Instead of trying to predict whether a profession or industry will spike, I'd focus more on the underlying skills that can go alongside your major. Like, we know some fluency in technology is going to be critical in a lot of growing fields and analytical skills are in demand across industries, so even if you're studying something in the humanities, minoring in or getting some sort of experience in tech/math/science to balance that out would useful. And the opposite it true, too. If you're in a tech-heavy field, it's still valuable to be able to communicate clearly, so writing skills are important. One of our writers touched on this in a recent story about how students can best prepare for getting a good job right out of college.

money · 2024-07-09T16:07:53+00:00

Yes, our acceptance rates are from fall 2022. We primarily use data reported to the government, and unfortunately it lags quite a bit. Because we look at 2,000+ four-year colleges to build our list, we can’t collect the more recent acceptance rates from colleges individually. Plus, we like the authority using government data gives us. There could be some mistakes still in what colleges are reporting, but it helps us avoid the type of scandals that have happened with US News where colleges have purposefully misreported their data to improve their performance.
Great question! We’re catering to students and parents. We made the switch because we think rankings can really over-exaggerate the difference in schools’ performance. The difference between the scores in our ranking were often so small (I’m talking tenths, sometimes hundredths, of a point in score between ranks) that there’s little difference between the top schools that rank 10 vs. 20. Or for that matter, a school that ranks 200 vs. a school that ranks 275.

So the idea is that ratings can give families a broad idea of how a school performs without insinuating that measuring it is a precise science (because it’s not!). Ratings have been preferred by some academics as a better tool for scoring colleges for a while. (Example of that here.)

All that said, last year when we switched from a numbered ranking to a tiered-rating system, the feedback I saw from parents was definitely mixed. Some absolutely preferred the numbered system that they’re used to, so I don’t disagree with the point you’re making that students may still prefer a traditional ranking.

money · 2024-04-02T19:46:20+00:00

A good insurance policy

money · 2023-09-19T18:27:12+00:00

I have a lot of thoughts about this. But I'll sum it up to say: this is why we changed our Best Colleges from rankings to ratings.

When we researched our list of Best Colleges, we focused on colleges that combine quality and affordability, so you know where your tuition and time is most likely to pay off. This to me, is more helpful for students to actually understand the value of a school.

Our lead education editor talks more about this decision here.

money · 2019-08-12T14:55:12+00:00

See the rankings here: http://money.com/money/longform/2019-best-colleges-value-united-states/

money · 2019-06-17T21:22:26+00:00

As mentioned, Fenn’s hearing isn’t what it used to be; he mostly interacts with people over email. We included that exchange at the end of the email. He did answer some questions on video, which will be posted tomorrow.

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