Toward an economic mobility ranking of U.S. colleges

By Matthew M. Chingos and Kristin Blagg. The release of institution-level earnings information as part of the Obama Administration’s new College Scorecard data has already spawned new “value-added” rankings based on the economic outcomes of students who attended similar institutions. These emerging rankings are an improvement on simple unadjusted rankings, but the wide variance within and among these rankings prompt questions about the precision of this methodology. More...