Money Magazine ranks UM No. 22 College in U.S.

Submitted by ish on

http://time.com/money/collection/moneys-best-colleges/moneys-best-colle…

they claim to evaluate the value of a degree based on the cost of school and the average earnings of graduates.  unlike USNews and other publications, Money Magazine considers all colleges in one list, they don't break them down by region, whether a school is a "liberal arts college," etc.  that means the no. 22 ranking is even more impressive.  on the other hand, the top two colleges are babson and webb, two schools i've never heard of.  the standard bearers of college excellencey appear on the list as well, so it isn't totally out of whack.  anyway, an interesting note.

Yeezus

July 28th, 2014 at 2:04 PM ^

Babson is a small school in the Northeast that has some very, very wealthy alumni that drive them to the top.  I worked with a kid from Babson and he was a great guy.  

oriental andrew

July 28th, 2014 at 3:06 PM ^

Babson is a fantastic school if you want to study business.  There are some "specialty" colleges that focus in specific areas.  In engineering, Harvey Mudd is about as good as you can get.   Think of Michigan's engineering program as a standalone college and you have Harvey Mudd, or Michigan's business school as a standalone college and you have Babson.  

maizenbluenc

July 28th, 2014 at 3:31 PM ^

on Long Island. They actually are one of a handful including Michigan (MIT, Naval Academy, and Berkeley) for that degree. I believe every student attending is on a scholarship so the ROI probably closes nicely. Even with the lack of ship building in the US, there is the offshore oil business to go into.

 

maizenbluenc

July 28th, 2014 at 7:57 PM ^

75 student school that is very deep on Naval Architecture, but no real college life - or - Michigan which is also a great NA&ME school - but you get a real college life with it.

It's great - to be - a Michigan Wolverine!

Counter point though - I cannot tell how they calculated the average net cost for Michigan, but I bet it is way higher than 95K for the 40% from out of state. So either there is a wicked double humped normal curve, or they only used in state numbers. Hard to tell.

bronxblue

July 28th, 2014 at 10:19 PM ^

Yeah, my thinking too.  I get that they are REALLY good with naval architecture, but that's basically a mid-sized upper-class lecture for a school.  

The thing I get a kick out of the list is that for every Babson and Webb, there are your usual Harvard/Princeton/Stanford/Columbia contingent and your big-name public colleges like Cal and UM.  Basically all it does is move a couple of specialty schools (that cost lots of money) up a bit.

Commie_High96

July 28th, 2014 at 8:16 PM ^

Seems bad, but in what other university ranking system is Sparty only 21 spots behind the University of Chicago, which came in at 101? Seriously, Money magazine said there are 100 schools in the Country better than the University of Chicago.

LSAClassOf2000

July 28th, 2014 at 2:29 PM ^

Things actually get intriguing when you play around with the customized search. I selected "Midwest" and "20,000+" and left GPA and acceptance rate alone. The top schools given the criteria were:

22) Michigan

76) Purdue - Main Campus

76) apparently, Purdue ties with Illinois - Champaign-Urbana

86) Iowa State

99) Wisconsin - Madison

Farther down that same list, MSU, OSU, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri in that order. After Missouri, which is #189, the criteria do not match again until Cincinnati at #372.

Public_97_Ivy

July 28th, 2014 at 3:46 PM ^

Yet another one of our former President's failings is a roughly half-decade of continuously lower rankings in almost every ranking I came across.  Note, I did not say LOW, I said LOWER.  Apparently Mary Sue's greatest accomplishment as President was her ability to accept accept checks written by numerous super wealthy graduates.  Besides drinking herself into a near stupor, it isn't obvious she was doing much else.  Besides of course implementing the smoking ban at the behest of her other part-time employer, Johnson and Johnson (because being President of UM is apparently such an easy job you can maintain a position on one or two other executive boards.  Don't let service to Michigan stand in the way of pocketing another few hundred thousand for "administerial" roles.)

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

July 28th, 2014 at 2:35 PM ^

I wonder....I think Michigan colleges (and Midwestern ones in general) get a little hampered by the "salary of grads" thing.  You stay in Michigan after school, you're naturally going to get a lower salary than someone out East or in California, but, cost-of-living-wise, would you rather make $60K in Boston or $50K in Detroit?

alum96

July 28th, 2014 at 4:02 PM ^

The automotive industry pays its white collar a lot more than most industries.  Obviously it cannot compete with Silcon Valley, Wall Street etc but plenty of UM grads go to those areas to work as well and I think unless you exclude a few locales the state of Michigan actually does very well for the white collar workers.  Until this downturn in 2008, Oakland County was the 3rd or 4th richest per capita in the country.  Northern VA has become the new darling due to all the money coming out of DC and so many companies relocating there and the lobbyist industry explosion but the typical Michigan white collar actually does quite well, and when adjust for cost of living even better.  So I guess I buy your argument versus NYU, Harvard, Boston College, and maybe Virginia and USC but its a bit of a generalization.

Even in the public service arena people have it pretty good here.  Teachers in Michigan are about 4th in the country behind Alaska, New York and one other - I know people who go to North Carolina to teach and are shocked at how much lower wages are.

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

July 28th, 2014 at 4:16 PM ^

Well, of course it's a generalization....one could write a doctoral thesis on that topic and do all sorts of research into fields, cost-of-living, percentage of grads that stay instate vs. go out of state, etc.

Actually, U-M is probably insulated from the phenomenon much more than other schools in the state.  I think it's more about the schools further down the list.  Not the U-Ms and UVAs but the UDMs and George Masons. 

MGoSoftball

July 28th, 2014 at 4:52 PM ^

I am a White Collar Automotive Engineer.  The reputation of Michigan is very high.  Many HR Managers have a very high opinion of Michigan even though many of these HR Managers did not attend Michigan.  

One HR Manager told me that all he needed to see was a Degree from Michigan and that person was hired regardless of position.  I know of several Michigan grads with non related (History, Art) degrees working in the technical side of the Automotive Industry. 

He avoided MSU and EMU grads like the plague.  He had a postive opinion of CMU, Ferris, NMU and Lake State.  I am not sure his rationale was reasonable though.

 

bronxblue

July 28th, 2014 at 10:31 PM ^

I will say this about NY - people look at average salary and think it is amazing, but (a) the cost of living is quite a bit higher, and (b) that average salary in industries such as finance is pretty skewed; there are LOTS of back-office workers who are essential to the business but don't get paid nearly as much as the traders and analysts.  So I do think there is a bias toward the coasts that may be unfounded, or at the bare minimum a bit of a fallacy.

MGoSoftball

July 28th, 2014 at 4:44 PM ^

ranking (not to be confused with High Times) is heavily focused on acedemics.  I think it is a better measure of how well the school educates its students and how that education is perceived world wise.  I wonder what ranking High Times would give us?

The USN&WR's rankings are a joke because they factor in such things as quality of life, access to public transportation, the number of pizza places within walking distance, intermural sports etc.  Now these things are all important but the #1 reason to go to school is to get educated.  Partying should be #21 on the list of priorities (IMO).

This is the first time I looked at Money's rankings.  It seems reasonable to me but East Coast schools will be heavily favored.  I will have to spend a little more time on this list.

MGoCombs

July 28th, 2014 at 7:18 PM ^

I think the point is maybe there is something wrong with the criteria then. I appreciate their attempt to take a strictly quantitative approach, but when Yale is that low and schools like USC aren't even in the top 100, you have to begin to wonder if you are weighting properly or using the right criteria to begin with. It seems like expensive schools get nailed because obviously that's part of their criteria, but also because they are using income 5-years out as a measure of the benefit related to the cost. I want to know what the average USC or Yale alum is making 10, 20, 30 years out. I have to imagine it's more than a BYU grad. I don't mean to pick on BYU because it's a fantastic school, but you end up with some pretty strange "rankings" when you take this narrow approach.

The size/academic diversity of enrollment also inherently drag down the average salary, since your Michigans and Cals of the world are graduating liberal arts majors as much as STEM/Business majors (when compared to say a strictly technical school). That says nothing about the "value" of the education if you are a STEM major at those schools. Again, not picking on liberal arts majors (I was one and am doing fine for myself), but these factors skew the value and ranking.

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

July 28th, 2014 at 9:33 PM ^

Well, on the majors thing, one thing the methodology did was to adjust by majors "to see whether students at a particular school earn more or less than would be expected given the mix of majors at that school."  So if a school is heavily liberal arts, that's factored in, and I don't think that skews anything.

I would argue that these criteria are mainly (though not totally) objective, and that if the results of objective criteria fail to match up to subjective opinion, rejecting the criteria in favor of the opinion is the exact opposite of any kind of scientific approach.  They set out to rank colleges by value, so it stands to reason that a very expensive school had better deliver awesome results or else fall behind.  What good would it be to pay $200,000 for an education that doesn't deliver twice the results of a $100,000 education?  I do agree that a look further out in one's career would be very useful, but then it might also dilute the effect of the school.

I Like Burgers

July 28th, 2014 at 8:06 PM ^

After they graduate, I wonder how many Yale grads are enrolled in post grad.  That might skew that salary after graduation number quite a bit.  Would love to see what the 10 years after graduation salary number is for BYU and Yale.

NOLA Wolverine

July 28th, 2014 at 8:44 PM ^

The period between graduation and realizing a ROI isn't going to be all that short for the Bulldog unless the schooling was heavily subsidized. Your BYU friend has also been living with a net income during that five years while your Yale friend was tumbling further into the red. The paths eventually cross, but you'd have to look at what age that occurs and ask your self if it's really worth finally being ahead that late into life. 

sadeto

July 28th, 2014 at 4:42 PM ^

I've heard of the Webb institute, it's on the next peninsula east of where I live. As someone noted, tuition is free. And the market for grads is small but lucrative. 

All of these rankings systems have their flaws, I think they are useful only in that they collect a lot of descriptive information about schools that may be helpful to applicants. Money's rankings are heavily influenced by regional disparities in salaries - how is tiny Manhattan College so high up on that list? Because it's in New York and primarily attracts local students who are likely to stay in the New York area (vs. Fordham, for example, to which it is compared but which has a more regional student base).

 

Real Tackles Wear 77

July 28th, 2014 at 4:52 PM ^

Sorry, but I have a hard time taking any rankings seriously that put a school at #2 where the entire enrollment is about 1/6 of an average lecture hall at UM and tries to compare said school apples-to-apples with anyone else.