A new ranking by The Economist of all U.S. four-year, non-vocational colleges and universities places Drake University 17th in the nation for value.
The Economist applied an original mathematical formula to the federal Department of Education’s data on college graduates’ mid-career earnings to identify the “gap between how much money [each college’s] graduates earn and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere.” Out of 1,283 colleges, Drake ranked 17th for return on investment—just below Georgetown University and directly above Rensselaer Polytechnic University.
The Brookings Institution released its own value rankings this week, using the same federal scorecard data but a different mathematical formula. The rankings—which were much broader than The Economist’s, and included two-year colleges as well as four-year colleges—placed Drake in the top 100 four-year schools tied with Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Colgate and Syracuse among others.