With college deposits already due, most high school graduates have decided where they want to spend their next four years learning, networking, and just having fun. But in the back of their minds—or, more accurately, their parents’ minds—is the question of whether they have made the right choice. Will the cost of college pay off in post-collegiate job placement and salary? Is student debt really “good debt”? Does studying the humanities make sense? And how does a university’s ranking actually translate into a student’s education?
To address these and other questions, a team of professors—Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerleile, and Christopher Newfield—have written Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students, which takes a critical look at the metrics that universities use to advertise themselves. The metrics they focus on are return on investment, university ranking, selectivity, tuition, student debt, average wages by college major, and access to one’s preferred major. What they discover is that many of these metrics are confusing, misleading, and—more importantly—easily replaceable with better alternatives.
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