The White House this weekend released a new consumer tool, the College Scorecard, aimed at helping students and their parents compare colleges. To the great delight of higher-ed wonks, the Obama administration also released the troves of data underlying the tool — including previously unavailable figures on student debt, loan repayment, and graduate earnings.
Caveats abound. Most notably, the earnings data — which is based on tax records — includes only students who received federal loans or grants, omitting a large sector of the student population.
But, as observers predicted over the weekend, the White House has essentially given the college-rankings industry federally verified data on which to base future best-of lists. All that’s left to do is pick your categories, crunch the numbers, and rank the institutions top to bottom.
So why wait? Here are five rankings built on the new data. Please don’t take my arbitrary choices as anything more than an illustration of the data’s breadth.
Ivy League colleges, ranked by highest reported median annual earnings among working students 10 years after enrollment:
Harvard University ($87,200)
University of Pennsylvania ($78,200)
Princeton University ($75,100)
Columbia University ($72,900)
Cornell University ($70,900)
Dartmouth College ($67,100)
Yale University ($66,000)
Brown University ($59,700)
Public, four-year colleges, ranked by highest median debt of completing students:
Central State University ($39,068)
Grambling State University ($38,173)
South Carolina State University ($37,000)
Fort Valley State University ($35,500)
Kentucky State University ($34,942)
Lincoln University of Pennsylvania ($33,830)
Texas Southern University ($33,763)
Alabama A&M University ($33,612)
Alabama State University ($33,452)
Savannah State University ($32,887)
Among colleges whose students scored an average of at least 1400 on the SAT, these had the lowest median annual earnings:
Carleton College ($46,100)
Swarthmore College ($49,400)
Pomona College ($52,600)
Bowdoin College ($54,800)
Haverford College ($55,600)
Amherst College ($56,800)
Williams College ($58,100)
Brown University ($59,700)
Rice University ($59,900)
Vanderbilt University ($60,900)
Princeton Review’s top 10 party schools, ranked lowest to highest by first-time, full-time retention rates:
West Virginia University (77.07%)
University of Iowa (85.84%)
Tulane University (90.49%)
Syracuse University (91.9%)
University of California at Santa Barbara (91.93%)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (93.06%)
Colgate University (93.12%)
Bucknell University (94.1%)
University of Georgia (94.17%)
University of Wisconsin at Madison (95.17%)
Florida’s public, four-year colleges, ranked by percentage of undergraduates receiving Pell Grants:
Florida A&M University (64.45%)
Florida International University (58.09%)
University of South Florida-Main Campus (41.27%)
University of West Florida (41.02%)
University of South Florida-Sarasota-Manatee Campus (40.73%)
Florida Atlantic University (39.99%)
University of South Florida-St Petersburg Campus (39.28%)
University of Central Florida (37.71%)
University of North Florida (34.8%)
Florida Gulf Coast University (34.67%)
University of Florida (32.07%)
Florida State University (30.65%)
New College of Florida (28.61%)
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/5-college-rankings-based-on-the-white-houses-new-college-scorecard-data/104437