R199 There's a major mismatch between reputations of universities and the outcomes of their students.
The Ivy League and similarly elite universities like Georgetown are in an eschelon of their own, based on the general brand values, just like luxury goods brands.
Louis Vuitton isn't actually better quality than any other bag maker but it'll always be able to charge more because people with means will always be willing to spend money to wear the logo.
Because wealthy people will always pay more to purchase luxury-brand degrees from Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, even USC, those universities will keep their prices inflated regardless of how their credentials convert to job placements and incomes. This screwy system will always throw off any attempt to normalize a sensible, objective means of assigning value to universities.
US News remains the go-to for college rankings. US News rankings are fundamentally based on exclusivity, not outcomes. The higher any institution's rejection rates, the higher US News ranks them. Endowment is also a factor, as are admissions test scores, which we now know raise directly in proportion to students' wealth. The more money a high school student's family has, the higher their test scores tend to be because of schooling tied to test prep and because of the ability to pay for expensive additional test prep. Everyone accepts these as normal parts of a university's value regardless of outcome.
The federal College Scorecard website is publicly available and it shows that state universities often outperform private universities that are more highly ranked and esteemed in terms of getting students more and better-paying jobs. For example, George Mason University in northern Virginia has job placement and pay rates and equivalent to Georgetown, UVA et al. and yet it is ranked far below them in US News rankings (and in general reputation) because it admits a lot more students and fewer students complete degrees (likely because of prohibitive personal finances--more poorer students means fewer graduates; all wealthy students means almost all students will graduate because they have no reason not to).
Washington Monthly magazine developed a better ranking system to compete with US News's, which focuses on return on investment, and its comparison shows that public George Mason University (#14) has less "bang for the buck" than private Georgetown (#1) and Washington and Lee (#2), but a lot more than Mary Washington (21), UVA (23—considered a "public ivy"), William and Mary (28) and George Washington University (39!).
George Mason's (GMU) in-state tuition is $12,500, so a bachelor's degree costs $50,000.
George Washington's (GWU) tuition (no in-state is available) is $57,000, so a bachelor's degree costs $228,000.
GWU costs more than four times as much and has lower job placement rates at lower-paying jobs, yet US News will continue to rank it more highly because it has a higher rejection rate, higher graduation rate, is in a city, costs more and (importantly) has more famous graduates because they were wealthier to begin with.
Completion/graduation rates historically have been accepted as one of the most important gauges of a college's or university's importance and value, but research has shown that most students are perfectly capable of keeping up acacemically and graduating UNLESS they have financial hardships. Poor students either have to drop out because they can't afford college, or else they do poorly because they have to divide time between working and studies and drop out as a result. Wealthy students don't have any obligations other than schoolwork and partying and so they almost always graduate. The idea that people drop out because they aren't smart enough to do well in college is almost always a fallacy. Admission to college and success in college in most cases comes down to wealth versus relative poverty.
