Which colleges are best at helping students graduate, earn more and pay back their student loans? The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tops the ETC College Rankings Index. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ranks first in improving students’ economic success on the ETC index. Next in line are UCLA, Brigham Young, William and Mary, University of Virginia (main campus), UC-Irvine, Pomona, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), College of Saint Benedict and Swar

Elite universities help well-off students do well, writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. They do little for upward mobility because they admit very, very few low-income achievers. He cites a paper by Raj Chetty and colleagues that issued “mobility report cards” for each college and university. It looked at whether young adults were earning more than their parents. The “true mobility champions of higher education” are places like “State University of New York at Stony Brook,

“Students who take a lot of career-and-technical-education classes in high school are hard workers who are less likely than their peers to skip class,” according to an American Enterprise Institute study, reports Ed Week’s Catherine Gewertz. Career tech-ed students tend to score lower on reading and math tests, but have stronger “noncognitive” or “soft” skills, the study found. Graduation rates are higher for CTE concentrators. They tend to earn more in their mid-20s than cla

How do we measure a school’s success? School of choice that raise reading and math scores don’t always improve later outcomes, such as graduation rates, college attainment or adult earnings, concludes an American Enterprise Institute meta-analysis by Michael Q. McShane, Patrick J. Wolf and Colin Hitt. “Policymakers need to be much more humble in what they believe that test scores tell them about the performance of schools of choice,” they conclude. “Test scores should not aut

The cheapest route to a bachelor’s degree — in theory — is to live at home, go to a low-cost community college, earn an associate of arts (AA) degree, then transfer to a university. Dental hygienists, who usually have a two-year degree, average more than $70,000 a year. But many AA graduates never complete a bachelor’s degree, write Mark Schneider and Matthew Sigelman of American Enterprise Institute. With general-education credits but “without high-value, marketable skills,”

sheepskin effect” requires a master’s degree. “If trends continue, by 2025 we will be offering master’s degrees in janitorial science.” Yet “obtaining a master’s is not a surefire path to economic success,” he writes. In The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s Degree, Mark Schneider and Jorge Klor de Alva report that a master’s degree pays off in some fields, but not others. Philosophy master’s graduates in Colorado had annual median earnings under $30,000, while “area studies” ma

Most people don’t learn much in college beyond basic literacy and numeracy, writes Bryan Caplan in The Atlantic. A degree shows mastery of the hoop-jumping skills that employers favor. An economics professor, Caplan has written a book titled The Case Against Education. The vast majority of students are “philistines” with little interest in the life of the mind, writes Caplan, who calls himself a “cynical idealist.” Indeed, today’s college students are less willing than those

A two-year degree in nursing or a technical trade can lead quickly to a middle-class wage, reports Forbes in a story on top trade schools. Payscale estimates a $52,500 early career median salary for a nurse with an associate degree. That’s more than 75 percent of four-year graduates earn. There are lots of opportunities for people with technical skills as baby boomers retire. “We just had a career fair here in Pittsburgh maybe four, five months ago, and we had more companies

“When states raise the number of math classes they require students to take in high school,” black students take more math and go on to earn more money, writes Emily DeRuy in The Atlantic. The higher requirements pushed more students to complete algebra and geometry — not calculus. “One of the reasons white students weren’t really affected by curriculum changes is that they were already taking the classes anyway,” she writes. “Black students weren’t.” #blacks #earnings #gradu

“Deciding your major plays a bigger role in determining your career earnings than does where you go to school or even deciding whether or not to attend at all,” says Gregory Wolniak in an Atlantic interview. He directs the Center for Research on Higher Education Outcomes at NYU Steinhardt and co-authored  How College Affects Students. For example, “it’s not uncommon for engineering majors to make close to 50 percent more than education majors,” Wolniak tells Mikhail Zinshteyn