(09-11-2019 02:38 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote: (09-10-2019 07:09 PM)LostInSpace Wrote: And now you’ve moved the goalposts to online degrees. Ivies are among the worst offenders yet highest ranked in every stack ranking in that space. They trade on their pedigree while selling their online programs to for-profit third parties to operate while having crap admission standards and ripping off unsuspecting applicants.
Ranking by ROI is in fact a knock against schools that graduate a lot of teachers and social workers starting with USNWR which is nothing other than than a prestige (student income ranking) list. Ranking universities by ROI disadvantages schools that graduate lots teachers because teachers have low earnings. OTOH schools such as GA State, unlike, oh I don’t know, GA Tech, do a good job of graduating students from low-income families and promoting social mobility by graduating lots of teachers and social workers. Half of GA State students receive Pell grants. Less than 15% of Tech undergrads receive Pell grants. We obsessively rank what we value which more often than not isn’t things like social mobility.
Good job by Tech though with their online degree program.
I'm not moving any goal posts. These are broad trends in academia that have been going on for some time.
The Ivy League, particularly the flagships within it like Harvard (c*** for Penn Jillette), Yale, and Princeton, have been a rip off for some time. And increasingly they are outright political actors only interested in a political agenda, but that's another topic for another board.
Ranking by ROI is a knock against teacher farm factories if they are ringing people up 10K+ a year for a job that won't make 35k in some low cost of living areas. If you take on 40k in debt for a job that makes 35k you're going to be in debt for the next decade before we even bring a mortgage into the picture. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad or wrong choice. But it should factor in to your decision making.
Regarding income mobility .... that IMO is outside the primary mission focus of a top flight school. It's not nothing or something to be ignored, but it isn't driving the bus. That should be part of the core mission of your local community college, your local state factory farm with 50k enrollment, etc. Regarding GT (not sure why you keep looping it back to GT?), AFAIK any Valedictorian or Salutatorian in greater Metro Atlanta gets a free ride to GT regardless of the school or any other factors. And of course Metro Atlanta's public schools aren't exactly world beaters.
Eh, the Ivy League schools aren't rip-offs. The average Ivy League liberal arts major might not necessarily have a higher ROI per se compared to, say, an engineering major at a solid in-state flagship, but they provide a clear entry point to the *truly* elite jobs that not even the upper middle class (much less the middle or lower class) really understands and don't have access to unless you go to a top 15 or so school: investment banking, top tier management strategy consulting, private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, etc. I know that the right side of the aisle seems to just want to believe Ivy League and Ivy-level schools are looking to advance a political agenda (and to be sure, they have an overall leftward political bent like most of academia), but the reason why it makes sense to attend those colleges is that they really do have disproportionate *control* over the power centers on Wall Street, Capitol Hill and Hollywood that drive American business, politics and culture. (Silicon Valley is slightly more egalitarian, but Stanford, which is actually the hardest school to get into in the country even above Harvard, has its own hold there.)
If my kids want to be engineers or an accountants, then paying in-state tuition to send them to my alma mater of Illinois provides a much better ROI compared to an Ivy League school. Heck, Illinois is straight up ranked higher than any of the Ivy League schools in those subject areas. However, if my kids want to have a direct shot at the professions that I mentioned above (where you're talking about potential seven or eight figure payouts mid-career), then that's where the $70,000+ annual costs for the Ivy League schools make sense. (It's possible to get there from a school like Illinois, but it's simply a lot less direct path.)
The real rip offs to me are the private schools that charge the same as Ivy League schools but aren't ranked any higher than your typical public flagship. I have nothing against, say, Boston University or George Washington University, but paying $70,000+ per year to go to *those* schools as opposed to in-state tuition at the average Power 5 public university is insane to me. I totally get it if $70,000 per year going to Cornell or Duke gets you a job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey that pays off many times over during the course of a career. That's not happening at schools outside of the top 15 or so, though, which means that full pay private school tuition for a school ranked lower than that elite tier is a really hard sell on the ROI front.
TLDR: a top 15 or so school is worth the price if you're gunning for one those elite 1% professions. Otherwise, the ROI of your degree depends more on your major than your school.
EDIT: I see that CitrusUCF made essentially the same point above about certain elite sectors.