Anybody who studies lists of best colleges is used to seeing Ivy League schools and a few other elite perennials filling the top 10. But in a new list of rankings meant to identify the best colleges for lower-income students, the Ivies are closer to the bottom than the top.

Montana Tech is the No. 1 school in a new “social mobility index” generated by CollegeNet, a higher-education technology company, and Payscale, a compensation-data firm. The SMI rankings are meant to highlight schools that do the best job of helping disadvantaged students graduate with the ability to start a career free of crushing levels of debt. Five criteria determine the SMI rankings: tuition, percentage of the student body from low-income households, graduation rate, salaries of grads once they start working, and the size of each school’s endowment. Here are the top and bottom 10:

Source: CollegeNet, Payscale More

Princeton, Harvard and Yale, which are first, second and third in the U.S. News college rankings, are 360th, 438th and 440th in the SMI listings. Some analysts welcome a different way of looking at the value colleges provide to their students. “Thinking about college as an escalator of upward mobility is a really positive step forward,” says Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution. He and others have argued that while college clearly helps raise the living standards of those able to graduate, it also tends to calcify inequality as kids from affluent families become the only ones who can afford a good education. “Let's not just look at how good a college is,” he says, “but also look at how colleges act to increase generational mobility.”

The biggest differentiator between high-ranked schools and low-ranked ones in the SMI rankings is the price tag. Average annual tuition among the top 10 schools on the SMI list is $9,021. Among the bottom 10, it’s $42,042. Expensive schools often point out that few students pay the full freight, but still, loans and grants go a lot further toward knocking down tuition costs when the list price is $9,000 than when it’s five times as high.

Graduation rates are higher at the pricey schools near the bottom of the list than the cheaper schools near the top, with the top 10 averaging 60.3% and the bottom 10 averaging 77.4%. But that could reflect cultural factors such as rich schools’ ability to cherry-pick better students. Even so, the biggest losers in the higher-ed arms race are students who take out loans for school but fail to get a degree, since they end up bearing the cost of college without the benefit. In that regard, dropping out of a cheap school is better than leaving an expensive one, if you took on debt to pay part of the cost.



Some limitations of the study



There are limitations to the SMI rankings. The analysis covers 539 colleges but excludes hundreds of others because CollegeNet used third-party data rather than information supplied by the colleges themselves, and couldn't get data on all institutions. Future versions of the rankings should be more inclusive. And even though CollegeNet dubs its rankings a "social mobility index" -- which implies generation-to-generation improvements in living standards -- they only capture data for a given year, providing less-comprehensive analysis than the name may suggest.









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