Disruption in WSJ college rankings

[Hibush]

The Wall Street Journal has come out with its 2024 rankings (Free access link). To keep things fresh, they mixed them up a lot from last year!
"Half of the colleges in the top 50 this year are new."

You may ask whether that radical renumbering is from extreme instability at top colleges or whether it is extreme instability in the ranking criteria. It is the latter, and a transparent example of changing the criteria each year to keep the clicks coming.

As you might expect from WSJ, they rank colleges based on how likely alumni are to make good money afterwards. That education may not make you a good person. The article notes "viewing higher education through this lens may not be best for everyone. The best school for any particular student might be one that's close to family or friends, offers a particular program of study or matches their values."

Babson was #2, which I suspect is its best showing among rankings. What WSJ liked about Babson was the General Education course required of all students, Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship, "where students launch startups during their first two semesters of college using a loan of up to $3,000 provided by the school." Is this the new GenEd paradigm?

[dismalist]

I saw the article earlier today. Clickbait. I just skimmed it after reading the first sentence or two.

Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship is just as irrelevant to most students as is a foreign language, perhaps even English, or History, to virtually all students.

This is niche material. It's OK to have niches, but that's it.

[apl68]

WSJ's criterion of what makes a good college education is shared by a great many people, so it makes a certain amount of sense.  And you can't blame people for feeling that way, when higher education has become so cripplingly expensive.

[mythbuster]

It's triggering low grade panic at Univ. of Florida, where they dropped from #1 to #35. This was one of the favorite bragging points for Ron DeSantis. Not so much this year.