The University of Arizona Gets a Low Grade

The Wall Street Journal has published its annual ranking of 584 US colleges.  Unlike other rankings, a major criterion is how well graduates do financially after graduation.

Other criteria are:

• The graduation rate of the school
• The years required to pay off the cost of a degree4
• Learning opportunities
• Preparation for a career
• Learning facilities
• Recommendations
• Diversity

I don’t think much of such surveys, for reasons that I’ll enumerate momentarily, based on real-world experience.  Among other responsibilities, I headed up the college recruiting program for an international company that prided itself on hiring the best and brightest from around the world, especially in STEM and marketing.

Here are the top ten colleges, according to the WSJ:

1. Stanford University
2. Babson College (Wellesley, MA)
3. Yale University
4. Princeton University
5. Harvard University
6. Claremont McKenna College
7. University of California, Berkeley
8. Columbian University
9. University of Pennsylvania
10. Davidson College

Here in my adopted home state of Arizona, Arizona State University is ranked 252nd by the WSJ, and the University of Arizona is ranked 325th.

The University of Arizona is even outranked by the University of Texas at San Antonio (No. 284) and the University of Texas at El Paso (No. 311).

In terms of fellow land-grant universities, the University of Arizona is way behind Texas A&M (No. 33) and Purdue (No. 133).

Because my boyhood hometown is St. Louis, I noted the rankings for its top-two universities.  Washington University is 39th, and St. Louis University is 168th.

I did not dig into the methodology used by the WSJ to determine what graduates earned after graduation, but I wonder how valid the numbers are.  The same for some of the other criteria.

The criterion of diversity is a red flag.  It almost always lacks specificity and definition and is contaminated by biases and the nation’s broken racial/ethnic classification system.  A good test is to ask a university the following two questions:  Does a poor student of Armenian descent whose grandparents were exterminated at the hands of Turks in the Armenian genocide count as a minority in your diversity numbers?  How about a student with a Spanish surname who is the offspring of wealthy industrialists in Mexico and part of the Spanish aristocracy?

Of course, universities would refuse to answer the questions, and, instead of reacting with self-reflection and scholarship, would attribute nasty motives to you for having the temerity to ask the questions.

What students earn post-graduation has less to do with the quality of their education and more to do with other factors.  For example, one of the benefits of an Ivy League education is the networking opportunities that become available with the captains of industry and government who graduated from the same school.

Location is also important.  Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley are next door to Silicon Valley, where internship possibilities abound, where there are plenty of networking opportunities, and where starting salaries for lucrative majors are in the stratosphere, particularly for employees who work for a startup and receive stock grants that become worth millions.

Even an old industrial city such as St. Louis has a location advantage, given that the metro area has a diversified economy and is home to some big companies.  Graduates of Washington University (No. 39) can find high-paying jobs locally should they choose to remain in the area.

By contrast, the University of Arizona is located in Tucson, which is somewhat out of the mainstream.  Still, graduates can do very well if they choose a major in high demand and manage their finances carefully.  My son is a case in point.  He earned a bachelor’s and master’s in engineering in five years from the University of Arizona, at a minimal cost, by paying in-state tuition, working as a residence hall assistant, taking advantage of scholarships, and landing good internships, including in metro Phoenix with Intel when it was still a high-flying company.  Now working for a Fortune 50 company, he has had a very good return on his college investment.

Another important factor is what a student chooses as a major and what a school is noted for.  For example, Babson College, which is ranked second in the WSJ survey, is a school known for its focus on entrepreneurship.  It stands to reason that a Babson graduate will do better financially than a graduate of another college who majored in Renaissance Art.

An observation in closing:   It’s interesting to note that many of the highly ranked colleges do not have a big-time football program or even a football team.  There might be a lesson in this for the University of Arizona.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].