What good are state education rankings? Sacrificing accuracy for the sake of not looking racist.

I got my copy of Reason Magazine yesterday. The headline article (behind a paywall), "Everything You Know about State Education Rankings Is Wrong" by Stan J. Liebowitz and Matthew I. Kelly, supports yet another indictment of the MSM as perpetrators of fake news.

The two authors focus on the U.S. News and World Report "Best Schools" blather and detail for us how this nonsense on public schools is generated. The authors demolish the house of cards in five well written pages that includes graphs.

Liebowitz and Kelly show two major flaws in the U.S. News publication. The first is that the schools of any one state get higher ranking purely because they spend more money per student. How this relates actual measured results remains enigmatic. The authors write, "[I]ntentions to raise performance is [sic] not the same as raising performance." In other words, a state that spends more outranks one that spends less even though the test scores are the same.

The second is an equally disturbing distortion. The rankings use raw test scores across entire states without considering the racial composition of the students in the state. It's common that Asian students score higher than whites, who in turn outperform Hispanics, who do better than black students. The last get the lowest scores on academic achievements. We would expect states with majority-Asian or white students to get higher scores than states with greater percentages of Hispanic or black students? Any honest evaluation of how well a school system is doing should disaggregate the student racial percentages and adjust the ranking so we have a better notion about how much the school system is adding to the test results and how much the student himself brings to the table.

The two authors focus on the U.S. News and World Report "Best Schools"

The USNWR rankings can be interesting to look at, but actually they tell us very little. In their college rankings, we know some Ivy League school will usually be #1, and a bunch of state schools will be #250 +++. The gap from #1 to #250+ is enormous and tells us little or nothing about the schools involved.

Some sort of really objective set of measures and rankings of all schools on a scale of 1 to 10 would tell us a lot more.

If one wants to be PRACTICAL ( i.e., how useful in real life a bachelor’s degree from a college gets one a good job ), then PAYSCALE will probably be a more useful site.

See here: https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors

You might assume that the highest earners in the country come from well-known Ivy League Schools like Harvard or Princeton, but the truth is, the highest median alumni salaries often come from students who attended small colleges with strong engineering programs. If we focus on early career earnings, elite military schools reign supreme. For bachelor’s-only graduates, the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis are often home to high earners. The fact that West Point and Naval Academy alumni graduate with military experience probably increases their worth to employers.

The colleges with the highest-earning alumni almost all have one thing in common – they produce a lot of engineers and other workers with valuable STEM degrees. However, that doesn’t mean that everybody should become an engineer.

PayScale publishes this data to help students understand the typical salaries they will likely go on to earn, and the corresponding amount of student debt they can afford to take on.

But don’t count liberal arts schools out just yet. Even more classically styled liberal arts schools, like Grove City College or Hillsdale ( both do not even accept Federal aid) produce well-paid graduates.

Prospective students should just be aware that a liberal arts degree may mean it takes them a longer time to get settled in the career of their dreams, but their well-rounded, analytical skill sets and ability to clearly communicate can set them up for successful careers.

That’s an interesting ranking and useful in some ways. But even that has a large, built-in distortion with that being the large disparities in the cost of living in various parts of the US. The COL in the Northeast and coastal California could easily be around 50% higher than in the South and much of the Midwest based upon housing cost along.

Someone starting their career in Charlotte, or Birmingham, or Indianapolis, or Dallas, or NYC, or Los Angeles, or Silicon Valley would be looking at dramatically different COL and that would definitely be reflected in their compensation.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.