CONTACT: Michelle Hillman
Houghton College Ranked in the Top Three Percent of Colleges Nationwide by Forbes
On August 3, 2011 Forbes released its list of public and private colleges and universities, ranking the best schools based on post-graduation outcomes and from the students’ point of view. Houghton College is ranked in the top 3 percent of colleges nationwide according to this fourth-annual ranking of America’s Top Colleges, compiled by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP).
“The best years of life are also among the most expensive. Choose with care,” writes author Michael Noer, an editor at Forbes. He remarks that the annual ranking “…focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt…We try and evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would: Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree?”
To address these concerns, the staff at CCAP gathered data from a variety of sources. They based 27.5 percent of the rankings on how satisfied students are with their college experience, examining predicted and actual freshman-to-sophomore retention rates (5 percent each) and student evaluations of classes on the website RateMyProfessors.com (17.5 percent). Another 30 percent is based on post-graduate success, determined by the salary of alumni from Payscale.com (15 percent), listings of alumni in Who’s Who in America (10 percent), and alumni in Forbes/CCAP Corporate Officers List (5 percent). An additional 17.5 percent is based on the estimated average student debt after four years (10 percent assigned to the four-year debt load for a typical student, 5 percent given for student loan default rates, and 2.5 percent for predicted vs. actual percentage of students taking federal loans). 17.5 percent of the ranking is based on four-year college graduation rates – half of that is the actual graduation rate, the other half the difference between the actual graduation rate and a predicted graduation rate. The last component is based on the number of students, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or National Science Foundation Fellowships. [www.forbes.com]
Houghton College ranked 205 of the top 650 institutions selected from over 7,150 colleges and universities throughout the United States – placing Houghton in the top 3 percent of all public and private schools. Furthermore, Houghton was ranked 21st of the 56 New York schools listed.
