These are the levers that matter after graduation: your paycheck, your first job, and your long-term career trajectory. We left out the “prestige theater” (citations, reputation scores, and legacy rankings) because they tell you more about the school’s vanity metrics than about your real-world outcome.
Factors of Rankings
RSS
Relative Salary Score
- Normalizes salary against the local economy
- Avoids misleading raw salary comparisons across regions
- Measures relative earning power, not absolute numbers
RPPO
Real Purchasing Power Outcome
- Adjusts salary for cost of living
- Captures actual lifestyle and savings potential
- Prevents overvaluing high-salary, high-cost locations
ER
3-Month Employment Rate
- Measures immediate employability
- Strong indicator of recruiting pipeline strength
- Differentiates schools with efficient placement systems
ER
6-Month Employment Rate
- Provides a stability buffer to the 3-month metric
- Accounts for delayed placements without over-penalizing
- Ensures employment outcomes are not artificially compressed
IR
% with ≥1 Internship (Undergraduate)
- Direct measure of student access to work experience
- Strong predictor of full-time employment outcomes
- Reflects effectiveness of career preparation during school
ROI
10-Year Salary / 4-Year Tuition
- Aligns directly with student financial decision-making
- Incorporates both cost and earnings trajectory
- Aligns directly with student financial decision-making
F-S Ratio
Normalized Faculty-to-Student Ratio
- Included as a secondary environmental quality factor
- May influence student experience and performance
- Included as a secondary environmental quality factor
Retention
1-Year Retention Rate
- Helps filter out institutions with poor first-year outcomes
- Acts as a stability indicator for student experience
- Helps filter out institutions with poor first-year outcomes
Exposure
Target Company Exposure
- Measures access to top-tier employers (e.g., investment banks, consulting firms, Fortune 100)
- Critical for business students where outcomes are highly employer-driven
- Serves as a proxy for network strength and recruiting pipelines