#1. The grad school placement rates excluding legacies. The current numbers are artificially inflated by the almuni who follow in Daddy/Mummy's footsteps.

#2. The career placement numbers excluding those who got their jobs because of family connections.

Folks might find Shaun McElroy's posted compilation of Common Data Set sites helpful.

For the moment, I'm side-stepping the question of which data I'd recommend you and your (nonexistent) daughter hone in on…

If you think “persuasive writing is a dumb skill,” you might ask yourself why, if it’s true that whatever you mean by persuasive writing is a skill best left to management, folks in management have it (or have fooled enough people into thinking they have it so that they *are* management!). Somebody in the corporate hierarchy must think writing skills are important enough so that those who have them (or appear to have them) get promoted, and those who don’t, don’t.

I paid for my kids’ college with the money I made doing corporate writing programs for executives, lawyers, and financial people who hadn’t learned in college or graduate school how to make arguments and persuade readers to act favorably on their proposals or accept their views on particular legal, business, or financial issues. Maybe they, too, cut and pasted their essays from Google; if they did, they missed out on what they were paying for in college.

And let me tell you, it’s as easy to catch a student who cuts and pastes stuff from Google as it is to cut and paste the stuff in the first place.

the goal of a liberal education is to be able to write a persuasive essay in the thesis-body-conclusion format. lib arts students are reminded of this every time ones assigned. so your metrics blue stater are designed to help parents find schools that will teach essay-writing to their kids for the least investment. but persuasive writing is a dumb skill. ask anyone "when's the last time you wrote a 5 page essay" and the asnwer will be "in school." in fact whats rarest in my world is the person who can communicate ideas simply and directly, and leave the "persuading" to management. i mean, there are people in my office with 4-year and graduate degrees who cant write a comprehensible email. others can't install browser addons or swap printer cartridges. most of them dont feed themselves properly or they have disturbing personality tics.

all the liberal arts graduates being pumped out each year are trained to sit on committees. the only reason they work better than non-degree holders (i believe) is that there is a mound of debt motivating them. and so the rational consumer would be wise to find the exact opposite of what blue stater's metrics measure. prospective students should search for the most expensive windbag TA-ridden universities to party 24-7 for 4 years before the bank starts knocking -and cut and paste their essays from google.

Most public universities are up to their eyeballs in various "accountability" self-reporting projects, like for instance the VSA, which according to its website has about 325 participants nationwide.

http://www.voluntarysystem.org/index.cfm

Frankly, I wouldn't look at any single measure to evaluate an institution as complex as a university (graduation rates are important, but what about the incoming student body? etc.)

There's also the fact that significant numbers of application decisions are made on the basis of factors like affordability, accessibility, and regional oreputation, not to mention intangibles like sports teams, etc.

So, no, choosing a college is not like choosing a television, because you are not buying an object, but a multi-year process of learning.

Students make all sorts of decisions before, during, and after the process, but to blame poor information at a single stage for these decisions seems strange to me, now that students frequently move from institution to institution, for all sorts of reasons.

1. Percentage of student credit hours generated (SCH, in the lingo) that are taught by TAs and adjuncts. For finer-grained detail, percentage of SCH taught by rank. If the TA/adjunct number is high, or the full professor number is low, beware.

2. Average class size by year (1st-year, sophomore, etc.). This number should be lowest for first-years, second-lowest for seniors.

3. Average full-time-equivalent (FTE) faculty teaching loads by rank. If there's a sharp dip in this number for full professors, you lucky parents out there are in all likelihood subsidizing a lot of faculty research, much of which, in the humanities, is of dubious value, to put it as kindly as I can.

If your 17-year-old daughter (to follow your hypothetical) is mature enough to make her own way, the best value for money is to be found in the state universities that have first-rate undergraduate programs (Michigan, Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts). If she isn't, the best choices (in the humanities, again; I'm not sure this is equally true for the sciences) are schools that *don't* have graduate programs, which in most cases distract from the teaching mission. There are some obvious ones (Amherst, Dartmouth [no grad programs in humanities, anyway], Williams, Wesleyan) and less obvious ones (Davidson, Occidental, Coe, Grinnell).

If you trust your kid to take some risks, the most interesting places in higher ed these days are the better community colleges. If you have a late bloomer, two years in a good CC (the California system is the only one I know well) can set him/her up for two good last years and a diploma from a much better place at half the cost.

Above all, visit a half-dozen campuses with your kid before deciding, and trust your instincts. Full disclosure: I'm not in the college-advising (or any other) business. Just a retired academic.