Figuring out the best colleges is big business. College rankings stay in the headlines for weeks after each release, and schools proudly tout their positions among their peers in marketing material. It’s simple enough to figure out which schools produce the highest-paid graduates — federal data can provide that easily. Arguably one of the most important metrics has been more elusive, demonstrating the importance of rethinking college rankings: Which colleges and universities increase upward mobility for the students who need it most, those who come from low-income backgrounds or ethnic groups that are underrepresented in higher education?

Obviously degrees from highly selective universities like Harvard and MIT are going to boost students’ earning potential. But which institutions are both enrolling and increasing earnings for low-income and underrepresented students in their respective regions around the country?

That’s what analysts from the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education set out to measure when they began developing a scoring system that identifies higher ed campuses that are helping students in their regions become upwardly mobile. They released the Student Access and Earnings Classification earlier this year.

The heavyweight schools according to this new scale of measurement may surprise you.

The Problem of Geography When Rethinking College Rankings

The nonprofits decided in 2022 that it was time to update the 50-year-old Carnegie classification system, which describes colleges and universities, to include a designation on how well schools support upward mobility. It would create a way for researchers and the institutions to gauge how schools were performing compared to their peer institutions.

The problem was that researchers did not have good data on where students started economically prior to entering college or their social success afterward, explains Kyle Whitman, the chief data scientist for Carnegie.

Using available federal data, Whitman and his colleagues set out to find a way to capture just that.

What they wanted to know was twofold, both measures based on where a college or university’s students came from. First, how did the share of low-income and ethnic minority students at the university compare to the makeup of the communities students came from? Second, how did students’ earnings compare to median salaries in their regions eight years after they started college?

Read the full article about rethinking college rankings by Nadia Tamez-Robledo at EdSurge.