White House Launches College Scorecard

Megalith

Megalith

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Anyone check out the College Scorecard site yet? Is it giving accurate statistics for your alma mater?

…the President announced the launch of a new College Scorecard, meant to help students and parents identify which schools provide the biggest bang for your buck. Designed with input from those who will use it most, the Scorecard offers reliable data on factors important to prospective students, such as how much graduates earn, and how much debt they have when they graduate.
 
In other words, which colleges indoctrinate you the best. These types of lists already exist and I do not need the government telling me what they think.
 
zerodamage said:
In other words, which colleges indoctrinate you the best. These types of lists already exist and I do not need the government telling me what they think.
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What on earth are you even talking about? This site lets you compare colleges based on how much their graduates make, how much debt they're in, how many of them are unable to pay off their debt, how many graduate, etc.
 
zerodamage said:
In other words, which colleges indoctrinate you the best. These types of lists already exist and I do not need the government telling me what they think.
Click to expand...

Your ideology must be blinding you to the actual purpose of the scorecard. All it does is tell you the average annual cost, graduation rate, and average salary after graduation once you give it information on what kind of program you're looking for and/or where you're looking to go to school.

If that's "telling me how to think" I must have missed something.

The whole purpose of this is data--colleges that produce graduates who earn low salaries (or just plain don't graduate) deserve to be called-out just the same way as hospitals that have high readmission rates. You can't measure quality without metrics.
 
Someone did not rtfa and assumed the worst. Granted, it was a fair guess given the times we live in.
 
Notre Dame's graduation rate is offensively high. Basically the greatest determination of whether you'll graduate from Notre Dame is if 1) you can afford it and 2) if you get an acceptance letter while you're in high school.
 
There's one metric that indicates the percentage of graduates who earn more than 25,000. I only saw numbers in the 70s, but I only looked at a few schools in Southern California and the Southwest. Maybe it's pretty uniform across institutions anyway.
 
Sovereign said:
Your ideology must be blinding you to the actual purpose of the scorecard. All it does is tell you the average annual cost, graduation rate, and average salary after graduation once you give it information on what kind of program you're looking for and/or where you're looking to go to school.

If that's "telling me how to think" I must have missed something.

The whole purpose of this is data--colleges that produce graduates who earn low salaries (or just plain don't graduate) deserve to be called-out just the same way as hospitals that have high readmission rates. You can't measure quality without metrics.
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Yeah, because those numbers about the unemployment percentage is accurate, right? So we are to trust what the government tells us about higher education? Right. Anything coming out of this government is suspect.
 
kumquat said:
What on earth are you even talking about? This site lets you compare colleges based on how much their graduates make, how much debt they're in, how many of them are unable to pay off their debt, how many graduate, etc.
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And you actually believe the government isn't going to "adjust" the numbers to promote whatever agenda it wants?
 
We get it you don't trust the government.
Do you guys have to make a scene in every thread?
Its not really expanding your base of conspiracy theorists.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
We get it you don't trust the government.
Do you guys have to make a scene in every thread?
Its not really expanding your base of conspiracy theorists.
Click to expand...

It's a conspiracy theory that this list is probably bullshit and that there are other lists that have been around forever that may be better? Okay....
 
I could imagine you are one of those people who pretty much reject everything the government says.

News Report: Government looking to decrease mortality in 3rd world countries

"Stupid government! it should spend those taxpayer dollars here!"

News Report: Government looking to spend X dollars on public facilities and services

"Stupid government!, we need to decrease spending!

News Report: Government looking to decrease spending

"Stupid Government! just looking to line their own pockets!"


Yeah, When someone constantly refutes EVERYTHING for the sake of refuting, they loose credibility pretty quickly.
 
zerodamage said:
Yeah, because those numbers about the unemployment percentage is accurate, right? So we are to trust what the government tells us about higher education? Right. Anything coming out of this government is suspect.
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coo coo. coo coo.
 
zerodamage said:
It's a conspiracy theory that this list is probably bullshit and that there are other lists that have been around forever that may be better? Okay....
Click to expand...

2echr9z.gif
 
zerodamage said:
In other words, which colleges indoctrinate you the best. These types of lists already exist and I do not need the government telling me what they think.
Click to expand...

zerodamage said:
Yeah, because those numbers about the unemployment percentage is accurate, right? So we are to trust what the government tells us about higher education? Right. Anything coming out of this government is suspect.
Click to expand...

zerodamage said:
It's a conspiracy theory that this list is probably bullshit and that there are other lists that have been around forever that may be better? Okay....
Click to expand...

Doctor-facepalm.png
 
This is not even close to the job of the federal government. Besides, we are broke. It's not time for new programs.
 
roma said:
This data/list will be meant as another club to think about race, sex etc over anything else. The highest performing colleges have the lowest % of certain minorities. Obama is 100% predictable.

"College Scorecard Sandbags Equity in Higher Education"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-mcguire/college-scorecard-sandbag_b_8129780.html
Click to expand...

That huffpost article was literally painful to read (my eyes now hurt). It was just rambling on and on with no direct point. It mentions race and gender in the first paragraph and then never mentions it again.

Though Race, Gender, socioec status MAY play into this 'scorecard' system in the future, it does not seem to play into it now.


when you buy a new computer product, you do your research: you look at the stats, the benchmarks, the reviews and the alternatives. You have sites like HardOCP that can give you some more first-hand info. all of this info is broken into metrics that are straight-to-the-point for what you want the product for. An SSD will display the read/write speeds, power usage; a graphics card review will test and compare the FPS, power draw, noise and give the product a rating. These products have obvious and quantifiable metrics by which you can compare and make an informed decision.

Educational services don't REALLY have a universally accepted metric by which to measure, compare and compete. If you think about it: What is Education SELLING you? What are you getting by buying their product? With a CPU, you get performance, or power savings, or the newest instruction set: You very seldom buy a new CPU because you want to put the CPU on a wall and simply 'say you have it'. The product and the effect of the product are different. We all know what the 'Product' of education is. But the measurement of the effect is very hard information to define, let alone get a hold of.

Education sells you quality of life. By getting a better education, you are promised a better quality of life: better jobs, better income, better peer respect, etc. If a CPU does not live up to its claims, it gets bad reviews and is considered a bad product, and sales may suffer: promoting the CPU designer to make a better product in the future. Now we have one more way to give the same treatment to sellers of education.

I don't see ANY way this can be considered a bad thing...
 
Isn't this info already know elsewhere? GovCo doing more of the same.
 
If we could let the government run everything it would be fixed already.
 
KazeoHin said:
Though Race, Gender, socioec status MAY play into this 'scorecard' system in the future, it does not seem to play into it now.
..
Click to expand...

Oh it will - guaranteed. This is a common tactic with these people. Banks ended-up being heavily influenced by ACORN and other radical groups when bank review criteria was made to include minority lending stats via the CRA. Even if people had no credit worthiness they had to be given mortgages/loans anyway. Obama and Holder forced over 3000 lenders to give car loans. After they paid penalties they had to agree to confidentiality stipulations so little was heard of actions.

Same thing happened in military where rape stats were massively inflated beginning in 2008. A woman having sex on one drink was considered "incapacitated" and "raped" even if sex was consensual. Of course that didn't match the law and cases were tossed - which was used as another 'crisis" as "low conviction" rate became new "epidemic". Obama is a total snake in the grass. He doesn't give a rats butt about kid's futures in college.

Check out the site..they even made sure no "ice people" were in the photo..

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
 
The only thing these scorecards tell me is how inflated school costs really are. Annual average costs of 30k+? Holy fuck. Then they give me an average salary after attending, but it's based off 10 years in the future.
What the fuck does a graduation rate even mean to someone? How easy the classes are? Isn't really up to the students to graduate? Why is that on a scorecard for schools?
Fix the costs of the schools by eliminating school loans.
 
I'm just amused they classified my alma mater (Umass Amherst) as "suburban". That shit is rural as fuck!
 
The data is also "highly suspect" IMO. They say MSOE (Milwaukee school of engineering) is only $21k/year. Are they HIGH? And that UW Platteville is $14k/year. Sorry, but MSOE is at least DOUBLE that in truth. In reality and Platteville is maybe $20k tops year. The salaries are also suspect. MSOE is an engineering school first and foremost. But UW Platteville is like most universities, a lot of degrees but has a very strong engineering program. So the averages are BS as well.

In short, we have data that is correlated but not causal to the requested information. Unless they also allow you to filter down the degree...the sites only value is to give somebody a job.
 
Trepidati0n said:
The data is also "highly suspect" IMO. They say MSOE (Milwaukee school of engineering) is only $21k/year. Are they HIGH? And that UW Platteville is $14k/year. Sorry, but MSOE is at least DOUBLE that in truth. In reality and Platteville is maybe $20k tops year.
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It gets complicated, and it depends on how the question was asked of these institutions. Schools define tuition in so many different ways.

Also, could it be a difference between the list price, and the actual average paid rate when you factor in financial aid, grants and scholarships?

It is the worst kept secret in education that the list price isn't particularly firm.


I agree that the biggest problem with studies like this is that you are often comparing apples and oranges. Often data is not collected the same way, or defined in the same way from institution to institution.

I understand why they would want to do something like this, given how fraudulent so many for-profit schools have been uncovered to be over the last few years, but I am not sure this effort was thought through as well as it could have been.

Besides, if you want this information, U.S. News and World Report is still fairly cheap, right? :p
 
In the case of MSOE, it looks like they list a lot of their tuition rates per quarter instead of per semester. Maybe the algorithm assumed per semester and is multiplying x2 instead of x3 or x4 to get the per year.
 
GaryJohnson said:
In the case of MSOE, it looks like they list a lot of their tuition rates per quarter instead of per semester. Maybe the algorithm assumed per semester and is multiplying x2 instead of x3 or x4 to get the per year.
Click to expand...

MSOE is trimester. However, to live anywhere NEAR the university, rent rates are stupidly high. Again...BS website.
 
I think that one important bit about this data is that the salary information only represents students that receive federal financial aid. Depending on the school, that number may or may not provide a representative sample.

Another aspect of the salary data is that it represents average salary 10 years after graduation. So, the most recent decade of graduates is not taken into account.

Given that the quality and success of higher ed institutions ebb and flow over time, this might be something to take into account.

But, in general, if I were a buyer of higher ed (student or parent, or grandparent), I would be interested in this data, fer shur.
 
So I went to visit the site last night and it returned an error when I tried to search. Oh so predictable.
 
KazeoHin said:
That huffpost article was literally painful to read (my eyes now hurt). It was just rambling on and on with no direct point. It mentions race and gender in the first paragraph and then never mentions it again.

Though Race, Gender, socioec status MAY play into this 'scorecard' system in the future, it does not seem to play into it now.


when you buy a new computer product, you do your research: you look at the stats, the benchmarks, the reviews and the alternatives. You have sites like HardOCP that can give you some more first-hand info. all of this info is broken into metrics that are straight-to-the-point for what you want the product for. An SSD will display the read/write speeds, power usage; a graphics card review will test and compare the FPS, power draw, noise and give the product a rating. These products have obvious and quantifiable metrics by which you can compare and make an informed decision.

Educational services don't REALLY have a universally accepted metric by which to measure, compare and compete. If you think about it: What is Education SELLING you? What are you getting by buying their product? With a CPU, you get performance, or power savings, or the newest instruction set: You very seldom buy a new CPU because you want to put the CPU on a wall and simply 'say you have it'. The product and the effect of the product are different. We all know what the 'Product' of education is. But the measurement of the effect is very hard information to define, let alone get a hold of.

Education sells you quality of life. By getting a better education, you are promised a better quality of life: better jobs, better income, better peer respect, etc. If a CPU does not live up to its claims, it gets bad reviews and is considered a bad product, and sales may suffer: promoting the CPU designer to make a better product in the future. Now we have one more way to give the same treatment to sellers of education.

I don't see ANY way this can be considered a bad thing...
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm going to disagree with everything you just said. College sells you quality of life? Keep on drinking that kool aid man.
 
Dreaz said:
Yeah, I'm going to disagree with everything you just said. College sells you quality of life? Keep on drinking that kool aid man.
Click to expand...

It should, and in many cases it does. Part of the point of this website is to help potential college students choose a college and a major that will lead to a solid career.
 
I don't see anything wrong with the list, however, I am not sure this addresses the big discrepancy with modern students of picking good schools that meet your financial targets ... although my alma mater (University of New Mexico) has increased in cost it is still very affordable and a degree in the right subjects will help your employability ... most of the students complaining about school debt are going to schools significantly outside their price range and getting degrees in worthless subjects ... if more students went to their home state colleges (most States have a least one one good one) and got marketable degrees they might spend more time working and less time complaining about debt ;)
 
Dreaz said:
Yeah, I'm going to disagree with everything you just said. College sells you quality of life? Keep on drinking that kool aid man.
Click to expand...

Hey, I'm not saying the quality of life they are selling is equivalent to the quality of life they claim to sell.

Just as anybody with something to sell is going is going to tell you all about all the great things this thing can do: Sports cars get you laid and make you cool, a video card will make you unbeatable in online games and turn your computer into a beast, a university degree will open up all the doors in your life and make you a winner.

All of these things are claims, and educational institutions claim they are selling you quality of life.

The fact that you disagree (and to some extent I agree with you) is ALL THE MORE REASON the institutions should be held accountable to the effectiveness of what they are selling.
 
Meh, looks like Oklahoma State is ranked pretty accurately. Below average cost of tuition, slightly above average graduation rates and salaries. The interesting fact I saw is it is still listed as about 70% white, which at least seems like it went down a little from when I graduated back in 1999.
 
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