Home News Report: Judging Colleges by How Much Recent Graduates Earn Is a Misleading Metric – Ed Surge

Report: Judging Colleges by How Much Recent Graduates Earn Is a Misleading Metric – Ed Surge

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When consumers search the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, the results that come back are ranked by the average salary students make after graduating. That’s just one example of the growing use and prominence of early-career earnings data in evaluating colleges.

But new research argues that the metric can be misleading, and that the amount of money that recent graduates make says more about the demographics of the students than it does about the quality of a college’s educational offerings. Ironically, judging a college based on the income of graduates may penalize the colleges that do the best job at lifting large numbers of students into higher social classes—those that, say, take first-generation college students and get them into well-paying careers, but in fields that are not incredibly lucrative.

That’s the conclusion of a new working paper by three researchers at the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT test, who analyzed the data used in the government’s College Scorecard. “Our findings indicate that consumers can easily draw misleading conclusions about institutional quality when using publicly available earnings data to compare institutions,” the authors wrote.

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