How Not to Do a Value Survey

This U.S.N.W.R. article seeks to find which schools are the best values by looking at the median salary to average debt ratio. Right away we have a methodology problem by comparing an average to a median. Another problem is that the survey includes only private sector salaries, ignoring the sizable amount of government workers who have salary/debt ratios well below one.

The worst problem, of course, is that they're using the schools' horribly flawed, self-reported numbers.

Here's the list for giggles:

1. Southern U.
2. Georgia State
3. Rutgers-Camden
4. Texas Southern
5. Brigham Young
6. North Carolina
7. Texas
8. Loyola-New Orleans
9. Georgia
10. California-Berkeley

There's like four or five of these that make sense. Anyone who thinks Southern U. Law Center grads are making five times their debt load after graduation is a fool, and if anyone can prove to me that Loyola-New Orleans median grads are actually making 84k a year with only 45k in debt (total cost full time is 45k a year and less than 20% get juicy scholarships on the tuition part), I'll eat my computer piece by piece and then move to Louisiana.

Garbage in, garbage out. If anyone actually did this survey honestly, perhaps only 15-20 schools would have salary/debt ratios over 1.0.