College Value Added Rankings: The Popular New York & New England College List

The Brookings Institution, a public policy institute based in Washington D.C., spent 2015 crunching an enormous amount of data in an attempt to answer the question which colleges add the most value?

Of course, there are many ways to measure value, but Brookings focused on comparing expected incomes for the incoming freshman demographic (for each specific college) to actual income of those graduates. According to Brookings:

Value-added measures attempt to isolate the contribution of the college to student outcomes, as distinct from what one might predict based on student characteristics or the level of degree offered. It is not a measure of return on investment, but rather a way to compare colleges on a more equal footing, by adjusting for the relative advantages or disadvantages faced by diverse students pursuing different levels of study across different local economies.

So this isn’t a measure of absolute earnings – no one is surprised that Harvard graduates earn a lot ten years after graduating. Rather, it’s a measure of which colleges seem to boost earnings the most – beyond what would otherwise be expected. Our first article on this was Connecticut schools ranked by 10-year value add. Our next: colleges commonly found on college lists of students in NYC and New England.

Northeast Value Added Rankings
Colleges commonly applied to by New York/New England students (not all in the Northeast). Rankings Produced 2015 by Brookings using Class of 1997-2001 college demographic data and 2011 (ten-year) median earning data. 10 Year Earnings are average 2011 annual salary for the 2011 graduating class.