The Cost of Income

University rankings continue to spread, both in publication and methodology. The latest has me thinking back to Boeing's entry into the business, where it used output-based criteria to evaluate the institutions. The aerospace giant proposed using internal data to match employee evaluations with information about the institution their pilots and engineers attended.

And rankings that measure job performance are not too far off from rankings that measure salary. This new approach took the average of graduates' salaries to evaluate institutions -- but added a twist. SmartMoney compared these salaries to the cost of attending the university, and using the ratio to determine "salary payback".

SmartMoney found the results -- which indicated a greater value in community colleges -- "pretty jarring". Why this is so surprising to them, I'm not sure, especially given the general agreement surrounding a recent report by NASULGC, which explored the education-as-an-investment argument:

"No university can legitimately claim that their students learn more than do students graduating from competing universities."

Indeed, such claims not only mislead students, the report continues, but can be detrimental to society. Why? Because studies and rankings such as those above take focus away from the social good of an institution, opting instead to pitch universities and colleges as simply a means to a higher income.