With college deposits already due, most high school graduates have decided where they want to spend their next four years learning, networking, and just having fun. But in the back of their minds—or, more accurately, their parents’ minds—is the question of whether they have made the right choice. Will the cost of college pay off in post-collegiate job placement and salary? Is student debt really “good debt”? Does studying the humanities make sense? And how does a university’s ranking actually translate into a student’s education?

To address these and other questions, a team of professors—Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerleile, and Christopher Newfield—have written Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students, which takes a critical look at the metrics that universities use to advertise themselves. The metrics they focus on are return on investment, university ranking, selectivity, tuition, student debt, average wages by college major, and access to one’s preferred major. What they discover is that many of these metrics are confusing, misleading, and—more importantly—easily replaceable with better alternatives.

In light of numerous college admission scandals and the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, many schools’ metrics may be outdated because they stopped requiring applicants to submit standardized test scores. Parents and high school students should therefore be skeptical about the measures that universities employ to sell themselves. As the authors note, the reliance on certain metrics has skewed universities away from the broader purpose of education (for example, civics, and liberal arts), pressuring them to overemphasize private financial return. Admission offices present these numbers to parents and students not only to make their schools appear more attractive but also to shape students’ ideas about why they should attend college and even the very purpose of higher education—for the benefit of future economic gain.

Return on Investment and Rankings

The most common metric used to persuade students to go to college is return on investment (ROI): given how much of my lifetime income I am investing by going to college, what proportion of my investment am I going to get back each year as a result of earning a college degree? Proponents of ROI contend that it provides transparency. If a student knows studying philosophy at a particular university will result in a lower ROI than engineering, and the student still wants to pursue a philosophy major, then the student is making a fully informed choice about his present and future.

Besides the issue of narrowing education to purely economic utility, there is a more substantial problem with ROI as used by U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Money, and other publications. Several leading ROI models rely on bad data “that is rife with statistical errors such as nonrepresentative samples and inaccurate self-reports.” For example, the US Department of Education’s College Scorecard to estimate students’ future earnings is calculated only for the 70% of students who receive financial aid from the federal government. This result not only misses 30% of students but also skews the picture of schools’ actual wages.

Another problem with ROI models is selection bias, which only compares a college graduate’s wages with a high school graduate’s, rather than comparing a college graduate with a high school graduate who was accepted at college but decided to enter the job market immediately. What matters is not whether the student graduated but “how much is their wage relative to what it would have been had they not gone to college.” One thinks of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg and compares their wages to those who actually did graduate from Harvard; or someone like Harold Hamm who only went to high school. Without consideration of this data, the ROI of a college degree is inflated.

There are other issues with ROI data: it is difficult to validate the accuracy of self-reported numbers, data is limited to only two decades, and it’s often not clear when graduate degrees are needed to attain the expected income. The result is that ROI metrics don’t help people deliberating about whether college is the right choice for them and, if so, what they should study. And even if it were possible to measure the monetary value of a degree, that might not be the most important factor to focus on, for there are other benefits to college beyond economic ones, including friendship, contemplation, and civic engagement. 

Besides ROI, university rankings, especially those of U.S. News & World Report, are consulted by parents and marketed by college admission offices. For the authors, the small differences in ranking between universities are immaterial to future student success. A better and much simpler metric is a university’s graduation rate because “graduation rates are harder to game than many of the other ranking metrics.” Moreover, when a university’s graduation rate increases, it is usually an indication that the school has invested in itself to improve the students’ actual education experiences and made efforts to attract higher-caliber students.

Selectivity is another metric that is used to reflect the status of a university: the more applicants a college rejects, the more prestigious is the college. Harvard, for instance, accepts only one applicant for every 19 rejected; Stanford only accepts 4.7% of its applicants. Of course, selectivity doesn’t actually measure the quality of the pool of students who applied; it only measures those who were accepted. Furthermore, universities like the University of Chicago have openly admitted that it has deliberately attracted more applicants to make the school appear more prestigious.

Admittedly, universities like Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford received more applications than other schools because of their renowned faculty and other opportunities they offer to their students. However, the author’s point is that these metrics are the wrong ones for parents and students to consider. Instead, graduation rates and spending on instruction are better indicators of a school’s academic quality.

What’s My Major?

Most Americans, the authors show, have relatively good information about the “sticker price” of private college tuition—the maximum cost students could pay—but they overestimate the cost of public tuition. Americans estimate that the average sticker price for private university is $43,400, just 6% over the actual number; but for public school, they believe it is $31,000, about 66% higher than the true average sticker price. The underlying explanation for this misperception seems to be “the proliferation of information about the high sticker prices of private universities” which, in turn, influences the public perception of the cost of public schools.

The overestimation of cost, particularly for public institutions, discourages people from attending college. Even though the net cost of attending either a private or public college is less than the sticker price—students are often charged a discounted rate for tuition rather than the sticker price—the ubiquity of the sticker price dissuades students from applying, especially those from lower-income families. Rather than relying on the sticker price, parents and students should instead look at the net cost of attending college. The authors suggest cost calculators like MyinTuition that calculate the expected cost of attending a university.

Once parents and students know what college will cost, the next question is usually, how much debt will be assumed? The authors provide a history of student debt, but, strangely and unlike the other chapters, they fail to provide any practical guidance for parents and students. They either could have discussed how FASFA (free application for federal student aid) works or how to decipher the number of students who have taken out student loans for a specific college. Given the recent debate about student loans and their forgiveness, this was a missed opportunity.

The authors return to more helpful ground when they discuss college majors. Various studies report that full-time mid-career employees with bachelor’s degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) have far higher income than students with other majors (pre-professional degrees were next followed by the social sciences and finally the humanities). But, like other metrics, the authors point out problems with the average wages by college major statistics.

First, there is the chicken-egg problem:

We know that business majors have higher average wages than humanities majors, but is this because the students studied business or is it because the kind of student who wants higher wages will choose to study business even if that student would still have been able to obtain a high-earning job if they had majored in the humanities?

Put another way, do business majors have high earnings because of what they learned or because their choice of majors reflects their preexisting preferences? The answer is we simply don’t know.

Second, it is not clear what roles a student’s social-economic status and the type of university (for example, public, or private) play in determining a college graduate’s wage. Third, as mentioned earlier, the quality of data about postgraduate salaries is poor and sometimes absent, since it is generated by self-reporting. What seems to matter more is that students complete their degrees regardless of what their major is. As the authors put it, “Whichever field the student prefers, completing that major will lead them to higher wages.”

Unfortunately, students are not free to pick a major they think is the best fit for them or prepares them for a job they want. Increasingly, particularly at public universities, many high-demand majors require prospective students to prove themselves by earning high grades in a specified introductory course before they can declare the major. A student who does not make those grades may be directed to a different major which might interest them less. These types of restrictions disproportionately affect underrepresented and low-income students who lack the academic resources to score well in these introductory courses. This in turn negatively impacts those universities which view social upward mobility as part of their mission.

University Metrics

Instead of advocating the adoption of DEI or lessening academic standards, the authors offer sound practical advice for underrepresented and low-income students. Examine class sizes for both required courses and your majors and select ones that are smaller, so you have direct contact with the professor. Set up a meeting with the department chair or staff to learn about the academic requirements and how best to navigate them. Consider the option of taking required courses at a community college and transferring them to your university.

Metrics have become the lifeblood of the modern university. This is not surprising in a democratic society where numbers appear to be objective, transparent, and universally accessible. While a metric has its uses, it is overemployed in today’s university where it excludes those experiences and knowledge that cannot be standardized or quantified in a pre-given way. The authors recognize the power and allure of metrics in American higher education and the promises and problems inherent in them.

For parents and high school students beginning their search of which college to apply to, and for incoming freshmen for this next academic year, Metrics That Matter is essential reading for knowing how to steer yourself through the university’s bureaucracies to find success, no matter whether you attach a dollar figure to it or not.