{"id":15653,"date":"2015-09-15T15:41:39","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T19:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15653"},"modified":"2015-09-15T15:41:39","modified_gmt":"2015-09-15T19:41:39","slug":"thoughts-on-the-college-scorecard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15653","title":{"rendered":"thoughts on the College Scorecard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"collegecost\"<\/p>\n

The College Scorecard<\/a> began as a promise\/threat to rate US colleges and universities, but for now, it offers\u00a0some digestible nuggets of\u00a0information on more than 3,500 institutions. The results for Stanford are shown to the right, as an example.<\/p>\n

I like some things about this. Mainly,\u00a0it tells a prospective applicant’s family not to be put\u00a0off by the sticker price.\u00a0Tuition plus room & board at Stanford costs $64,477, but the average student\u00a0pays much less than that, graduates quickly, and earns a lot of money. That makes it a good deal (in strictly economic terms) for most people who can get in. In contrast, Cambridge College\u00a0costs an average of $23,792 and yields an average salary of $36,500\u00a0for those who graduate–who represent two percent of those who enroll.<\/p>\n

I have three main concerns. First, the average cost overstates the relevant price\u00a0for a lot of students.\u00a0Stanford completely\u00a0waives <\/a>the parental tuition contribution for families with incomes up to $125,000 a year and waives the whole<\/em> cost for most families earning below $65,000 (which is about 60% of US households). The average cost is $15k because a\u00a0lot of Stanford undergrads come\u00a0from families in the very top\u00a0tier of the income distribution. If you have a\u00a0median family\u00a0income, Stanford will probably be free.<\/p>\n

Second, this kind of presentation can mislead about the business model. It can suggest that the real price of a Stanford\u00a0education is $64k, but thanks to alumni gifts, the university subsidizes\u00a0attendance\u00a0for needy students (who, in this case, may be upper-middle-class). I think the following\u00a0is closer to the truth:\u00a0there are a lot of highly academically proficient students whose families\u00a0can easily pay $64k and want to go to Stanford. Their kitchen counters cost more than a year’s tuition.\u00a0So Stanford charges that much and uses\u00a0the income\u00a0to help subsidize all the operations of a research institution. It uses\u00a0a sliding scale, however, so that all of its students aren’t\u00a0rich. I don’t necessarily think this is wrong: it depends on how much public good comes from the research. But the numbers\u00a0give\u00a0a somewhat misleading impression of the financial model.<\/p>\n

Third, the measure of “salary after attending” is very problematic if we see education as a public good. The\u00a0lowest-paid majors\u00a0for recent college graduates are<\/a> “early childhood education ($39,000); human services and community organization ($41,000); studio arts, social work, teacher education, and visual and performing arts ($42,000); theology and religious vocations, and elementary education ($43,000); drama and theater arts and family and community service ($45,000).” A college that produces a lot of preschool teachers, clergypeople, and community organizers is going to score a lot lower on the measure of “salary after attending” than Stanford does. The average salary for recent Hampshire College graduates is $30,800, much less than half as much as Stanford’s figure, but it would be misleading to infer that Stanford offers more value than Hampshire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The College Scorecard began as a promise\/threat to rate US colleges and universities, but for now, it offers\u00a0some digestible nuggets of\u00a0information on more than 3,500 institutions. The results for Stanford are shown to the right, as an example. I like some things about this. Mainly,\u00a0it tells a prospective applicant’s family not to be put\u00a0off by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15653"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15700,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15653\/revisions\/15700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}