Colleges sell themselves by the numbers — rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists — but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to?
This talk will feature Zachary Bleemer, Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University, who co-authored a new book, Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students, that explores popular metrics used by future and current college students, with chapters focusing on colleges’ return on investment, university rankings, average student debt, average wages by college major, and more. The authors draw on decades of scholarship from many academic fields to pair each metric with a concrete recommendation for alternative information, both qualitative and quantitative, that would be more useful and meaningful for students to consider.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), UC Berkeley Department of Economics, and the Berkeley School of Education.
John Aubrey Douglass, Senior Research Fellow at CSHE, will be the moderator. This event will also be livestreamed on YouTube.