A change in methodology in the U.S. News rankings helped boost schools where students have high earnings

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology took the top spot in the U.S. News & World's report best colleges ranking this year.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology took the top spot in the U.S. News & World Report's best colleges ranking this year, marking the first time since the 2012 edition that Princeton University hasn't held the No. 1 spot.

The change likely isn't a sign of any major shifts in the education Princeton and MIT provide students, and instead is the result of a tweak in the methodology U.S. News used to calculate the rankings. This year, the news organization introduced a metric that evaluates graduates' earnings within majors. MIT was the strongest performer in this new category, Eric Brooks, U.S. News' director of education data analysis said.

In addition to the movement at the top of the list, other schools with an engineering, science and math focus also moved up. The California Institute of Technology climbed six spots to No. 5 on the list, Carnegie Mellon University moved up six spots to No. 14 and Stevens Institute of Technology moved up 21 spots to No. 59. These schools "excelled" under the new metric, Brooks said.

The change to the rankings to focus more on earnings comes after years of growing concern among parents and students about the value colleges are providing. About 38% of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in U.S. higher education, compared with 57% who said the same thing in 2015, according to Gallup. The cost of college has been fueling these concerns for years and the recent challenges that young college graduates are facing finding entry-level jobs in the AI era have only exacerbated them.

By making the change, U.S. News is reacting to what students and families are saying they want from college, said Robert Kelchen, a professor who studies higher education at the University of Tennessee. "They want good-paying jobs, they want to know that there's a return on investment."

Adding the earnings metric is the latest in a series of moves U.S. News has made over the past few years to focus the rankings more on rewarding schools that help students succeed after college and less for the caliber of students they admit on the front end. The organization has faced criticism for incentivizing schools to be highly selective and focus on admitting students already likely to succeed instead of working to improve students' outcomes.

Methodology change

The new measure looks at earnings of federal financial-aid recipients whose highest degree is a bachelor's four years after graduation. By only including federal financial-aid recipients, the metric aims to minimize the influence that wealth and family connections can have on a student's earnings.

In addition, colleges are being evaluated on how well their students perform within each major. By comparing schools within major, U.S. News aimed to avoid privileging schools with a high concentration of degrees that pay well.

"They are trying to take students' majors into account, which is good," Kelchen said. Still, he added, "I'm not sure how granular they get in trying to control for it or if it's really possible." As the data editor for Washington Monthly, Kelchen produces that magazine's college rankings. At Washington Monthly, they've incorporated an earnings metric for years and they try to control to some extent for subject matter, but it can be challenging, he said.

And indeed, many colleges where the mix of majors tends to be higher-paying did fare better. Part of that is likely because at some "highly selective technical-focused institutions," students have particularly high earnings even within fields, Brooks said. He pointed to the example of computer science, where a graduate working in quantitative finance would likely earn a higher salary than the average software developer.

Stevens Institute of Technology, which has strong engineering, computer science and math programs, among others, moved up 21 spots this year to No. 59 on the list. The school's president, Nariman Farvardin, said that post-graduate outcomes have been a major priority of the school for at least since he became the Stevens' leader in 2011.

"The focus that we've had on student success not only in the form of graduating from college but also putting the graduates on a successful career trajectory has been in the forefront of our mind for as long as I remember," he said.

To help students land good jobs, the school focuses on keeping the curriculum up to date, making sure it's rigorous, hiring high-quality professors and ensuring those professors give students a lot of attention. That combined with the school's "enviable location," as Farvardin put it, in Hoboken, N.J., right across the Hudson river from New York City, helps to ensure students' success after graduation.

"We try to build very close relationships with the corporate world," he said. "The great, great majority of our students benefit from internship and co-op opportunities. By the time they graduate they already have built at least one - in most cases multiple - relationships" with employers, he said. That helps them get good jobs, have high earnings and pay down their debt.

The median earnings of Stevens students who received financial aid four years after graduation is $112,538, according to government data, nearly double the national median for four-year colleges of $60,377.

Though Farvardin is pleased with the recognition and that the outside world has caught up with his school's focus on post-graduate success, he acknowledges that the rankings can be "fickle."

"No university will change that much, either for the better or for the worse, in one year," he said. "Over these years I have recognized that I'm not designing my university based on how we perform in rankings. When you play tennis you try to keep your eyes on the ball, not on the scoreboard."

Some public flagships fall

The earnings-by-major metric replaced previous criteria that looked at typical federal loan debt of graduates. There are challenges with that metric, including that the government data U.S. News relied on was several years old and that the amount of federal debt undergraduate students carry doesn't vary much because the government limits the amount they can borrow, Kelchen said. (Students in their first year generally can take on $5,500, students in their second year can borrow $6,500 and students in their third year and beyond can take on $7,500.)

Still, the change does shift schools' focus a bit, Kelchen said.

"If there are colleges that are relatively high debt and high earnings, they could move up from this because debt is taken off the table and now earnings are on it," he said. "A debt metric provides an incentive for affordability."

Many public colleges moved down the list this year. In the top 25, the University of California, Berkeley, dropped five spots, the University of California, Los Angeles, fell three spots to 20 and the University of Michigan dropped five spots to 25. Further down in the rankings, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington both dropped seven spots to 49.

Schools known for their success at helping students move up the economic ladder, like the University of California, Merced, and the University of California, Riverside, also fell.

"An affordability metric, it helps public colleges a little bit," Kelchen said.

The swings in focus and the message that those changes send about what makes a "good school" is part of why every year higher-education leaders grumble about the outsized influence of the rankings.

"Taking a step back, what are these rankings for? I guess they are for students trying to decide where to go to college," said Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton, who studies higher education. "If that's what we care about, I see why they would be interested in ranking schools based on labor-market outcomes."

Still, it may be challenging for some to find the information useful if it pushes up schools with a more specific focus, full of students who are interested in and excel at those topics, he said.

To the extent the change is "a reflection of kids wanting more information about which schools will lead them to financial success, at least in the short run, this is the ranking you get," he said.

Bleemer's research does find that selective private and public flagship colleges provide students with a different product because they have more money to invest in each student. Over time the gap between these schools, which tend to educate wealthier students, and other colleges has only grown, his research shows.

"Whether or not someone dislikes rankings, one has to acknowledge that there are huge differences in how universities educate students," he said. "I don't know if the U.S. News weights are appropriate in identifying which schools are the best ones. There are big differences, the differences are growing substantially over time."

Nonetheless, the small movements among the top schools that so many in the media and higher education focus on are probably just noise.

"It should not be the case that moving up or down two spots in the rankings is changing what you do," Kelchen said. "But institutions, especially at the high end, are really concerned about status; this is a change that is outside of their control and they don't really like it."

-Jillian Berman