Yale Fails in Economist's School Rankings

College rankings: we’ve all seen ‘em. More specifically, we’ve all had to listen to that annoying kid in high school complaining about how school rankings are arbitrary and don’t really mean anything. He’s probably not wrong, but is it so horrible to feel a twinge of school pride when you see the big H sitting up at #1? And doesn’t it feel even better to occasionally see our favorite Connecticut safety school slide down a few places? More room to cushion the blow of our soon-to-be-9th consecutive victory.

Unfortunately for our good friends in New Haven, The Economist recently published a ranking of colleges based on how alumni over or underperformed expectations of earning potential, and Yale did not fare so well.

Harvard clocked in at a solid #4: 10 years after they kiss Cambridge goodbye, alumni earn a median of $87,200, exceeding expectations by just shy of 13 grand. Feel free to tell your friends going into finance– they are doing something good for the world. You know, if by that you mean helping Harvard do well in college rankings.

If you’re looking at the online page of rankings on the Economist’s website, you may be confused at first. Sure, Harvard’s at #4, but skimming down the first page there’s no sign of Yale anywhere. That’s right. You’ll have to click through 64 pages of schools before you’ll find any mention of the Bulldogs. (Or you could just skip to the last page, but where’s the fun in that?)

Yep, Yale placed an unfortunate 1270th out of 1275 schools that the Economist ranked. Alumni undershot expected earnings by almost $10,000, or the equivalent of about 1/7 of a year at Yale. Oof.