The Princeton Review ranked colleges by return on investment. They measured academics, affordability, and career outcomes. Three metrics that have existed since the invention of currency and employment.
Apparently someone at Princeton Review opened Excel for the first time. Had an epiphany. What if we told parents which schools don't bankrupt them? What if we measured whether graduates get jobs? Revolutionary stuff. Next they'll discover that water is wet and charge consulting fees.
The ranking exists because families now care about ROI. They want to know if $300,000 in tuition produces anything besides a philosophy degree and crippling debt. Weird that this wasn't always the top concern. For decades parents just wrote checks and hoped their kids would figure it out. Now they want data. Numbers. Proof that their money isn't funding a four-year beer pong tournament.
The Princeton Review will sell this list to anxious parents who think rankings matter. Those parents will force their kids to apply to schools on the list. The kids will get in or they won't. They'll graduate or they won't. They'll get jobs or they won't. The parents will blame the ranking when it doesn't work out.
None of this changes the fact that college ROI depends entirely on what you study and whether you show up sober. But that's not a rankable metric. Can't put "student's ability to not be a f*ckup" in a spreadsheet. So instead we get academics, affordability, and career outcomes. Three things that sound important in a press release.
The best part? They're charging money for information you could calculate yourself in twenty minutes if you weren't an idiot.
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