(08-05-2017 02:29 AM)owl95 Wrote:  Those metrics are sensible but how the heck do we lose that hard to schools like Pomona and Claremont Mckenna??? Many of my alumni peers are working their way into middle-senior management at Fortune 500 companies. You're telling me Pomona had better outcomes than the average Rice graduate 10-20 years out? Hard to believe.

The answer I believe lies in a bigger picture relative valuation between "Research Universities" (among which Rice is rated 15th here) and "Liberal Arts Universities" (among which Pomona and Claremont pop out as #1 and #2).

The other five in the Liberal Arts category ahead of Rice are:
3. Williams
4. Amherst
5. Harvey Mudd
6. Swarthmore
7. Navy

More specifically, but without seeing the numbers, we probably lose some points on our 4-year graduation rate (though they did this year give a partial credit to the 6-year graduation rate metric). When I was in school we had a lot of folks taking ~5 years to complete undergraduate requirements.

If true, then from an ROI standpoint you'd want to look at overall out-of-pocket cost to graduate (not just the four-year projections) and giving weight to 4-year graduation rates seems like a fair way to account for that.