For a long time, U.S. News & World Report had a monopoly on the college rankings game. Every August, the magazine would announce that, once again, Harvard was America’s best college, or Princeton, or, to shake things up, a tie between Harvard and Princeton.

很长的一段时间，U.S. News & World Report垄断了大学排名报道。每年八月，这家杂志社就会报道：又一次哈佛成为了美国最好的大学，或者是普林斯顿，或者重新改编成哈佛与普林斯顿不相上下。

But in recent years, there has been a profusion of rankings competitors, each with a different perspective on what “best colleges” really means. Playboy ranks America’s best party schools, much to the chagrin of administrators at the winners. The Princeton Review ranks colleges in no fewer than 62 categories, including financial aid and campus food.

但是最近几年里它出现了大量有关大学排名的对手，并且每一个对手都从不同的角度看待什么才是真正“最好的大学”。《花花公子》评出了美国最佳派对大学排名，这很大程度上在管理者的懊恼这一方面拔得头筹。普林斯顿评论则在不少于62个类别上给大学排名，包括财政援助方面以及食堂菜。

On Monday, Money magazine took its shot, releasing a new best colleges list focused on, unsurprisingly, money. While some elements of the rankings are familiar, the list is distinguished by the depth of its attention to a pair of questions on the minds of many students and parents. First, how much money will I actually have to pay — and, probably, borrow — to earn a diploma? Second, how much money will my diploma be worth in the job market when the time comes to pay my loans back?

周一，财富周刊也加入这一排名竞争，刊登出最新的最佳大学排行榜，该排名注重的，不出人意料，当然是钱。尽管这个排名所参考的因素众所周知，但是它的与众不同之处在于它更深层地关注了许多家长与孩子一直在考虑的问题。首先，我实际上应该花多少钱？—可能是通过借贷—去获得一个文凭？其次，当我应该还贷的时候我的这张文凭在职场上值多少钱呢？

The Obama administration has committed to answering some of those very questions about economic costs and benefits in a federal government rating of colleges that would, in the president’s words, determine “who’s offering the best value, so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck.”

奥巴马政府在联邦政府对大学的评估中回答了关于经济成本和收益的一些问题，这个评估用总统的话说，决定了“哪所大学在提供最佳价值，以便学生和纳税人用他们付出的美元能获得具有意义深远的大变革”。

The mark of a good new college rankings system — or, at least, an interesting one — is a deft combination of familiarity and surprise. Publish a list of nothing but unknown colleges and you lose credibility. Simply replicate the U.S. News hierarchy and you haven’t done anything worthy of attention. By this measure, the Money rankings are successful.

一个好的新的大学的排名体制的标志—或者，至少是，有意思的排名体制的标志—是熟识和惊喜的巧秒结合。如果仅仅是发布一些大家都不熟悉的大学，你就丧失了信用。如果只是简单地复制U.S. News的排名，你所做的也不会引起大家的关注。在这种衡量方式下，金钱排名就成功了。

M.I.T., Stanford and the California Institute of Technology are all in the top 10. But so are Brigham Young, Harvey Mudd College and Babson College. Babson is a business-focused institution in Massachusetts that most people have probably never heard of. According to Money, it’s the No. 1 college in America.

麻省理工大学，斯坦福大学和加州理工学院是所有U.S. News排名前十的大学排在新排榜前十位的。Brigham Young学院，Harvey Mudd学院和Babson学院也是。Babson学院位于麻省，是一所关注商业的学院，很多人可能还没听说过。根据金钱排名，它是全美排名第一的学院。

To calculate its rankings, Money evaluates colleges in three equally-weighted categories: quality, affordability and outcomes. Because it’s hard to directly measure the educational quality of a college, Money relies on many of the same proxy measures used by U.S. News and others, including SAT scores, graduation rates, student/faculty ratios and admission yields. These favor colleges that are wealthy, rich and exclusive. Predictably, Harvard and Princeton are near the very top of the quality list.

金钱排名用三种同等重要的标准来评估大学，推测排名：教育质量，学生支付能力和学术成果。因为很难直接地评估大学的教育质量，所以金钱排名也采用了许多U.S. News和其他排名媒体使用的评估标准，像SAT成绩，毕业率，师生比例和录取后被放弃率。这对那些富有的，高端的大学很有利。可以预见，哈佛大学和普林斯顿大学很接近品质排名的前几名。

The affordability metrics, by contrast, are more sophisticated than the simple measures of spending per student and published tuition favored by other rankings. Money starts with a college’s “net price” — tuition and room and board minus discounts and institutional scholarships — and then multiplies it by the average number of years students at each college take to graduate. The rankings also factor in levels of student borrowing and federally financed parent debt. Finally, Money includes two measures of student loan default rates that account for the percentage of students who borrow and the demographics of the student body.

相比这下，学生支付能力比那些其他排名喜欢的以平均每个学生的花费和公布的学费为评估标准要成熟得多。金钱排名从大学的“净价”开始—学费和食宿费扣去折扣和院校的奖学金—再乘以每个大学学生毕业的平均数。这个排名也考虑到了货款学生和接受联邦救济父母的学生。最后金钱排名也包含了两种学生贷款未尝还率：借货的学生比例和学生整体的人口特征。

Extreme affordability helps propel Webb Institute, a tiny college on the north shore of Long Island, all the way to No. 2 on the Money rankings. Each of the 80 students at Webb receives a full-tuition scholarship to study naval architecture and marine engineering, keeping costs, debt and defaults to a minimum. (Graduation rates at Webb are also very high.) Costs are also unusually low at B.Y.U., particularly for a private university. Its net price is barely $12,000, and loan defaults are almost nonexistent.

极端的学生支付能力把Webb学院，一所长岛北岸的小学院，一路推到了金钱排名的第二名。Webb学院平均每80个学生中就有一个是拿全额奖学金学造船学和海工工程学的，把成本，债务和拖欠的债务降到了最低。（Webb学院的毕业率也是很高的。）成本在纽约大学，特别是私立大学，一般也是很低的。它的净价是12000美元，而拖欠的债务几乎也是没有的。

The third category is the most interesting, and sure to be the most controversial. Money magazine defines outcomes almost entirely in terms of how much students earn after graduation. It uses Payscale, a website that allows people to compare their salaries to other people with similar jobs, as the source of the earnings data.

第三类是最有意思的，也当然是最有争议的。财富周刊对于大学成果的定义几乎完全考虑学生毕业后的收入方面。它通过Payscale这个让人们把自己的薪水跟同行比较的网站作为调查收入的数据来源。

First, Money rates each college based on the median earnings of graduates within five years of starting their career and again after more than 10 years. Then it calculates separate scores that adjust for each college’s student demographics and mix of academic majors. A college that graduates an unusually large number of public-school teachers, for example, would see its earnings adjusted upward, so it would not be penalized for focusing on public service. A college with many science and engineering majors, who are typically higher paid, would have its earnings adjusted down.

首先，财富周刊将会根据各大学毕业生在开始他们的职业生涯后五年内的平均收入以及其十多年内的平均收入来对大学进行评估。然后周刊将分别计算各大学的得分来调整各大学的人口统计基数以及学科专业混合分的偏差。举个例子，一所大学有很大数目的学生毕业后成为了公立学校的老师，那么周刊将上调他们的平均收入分，这样这所大学不会因为公共服务业的收入较低而影响到它的评分。同样，一所大学如果有许多理工科专业的学生，毕业后通常收入较高，那么周刊会下调他们的收入评分。

This is where Babson excels. It offers one undergraduate major, a bachelor of science in business. Babson graduates who logged onto Payscale reported earning almost $60,000 early in their careers, and $123,000 after more than 10 years. Those numbers are comparable to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Caltech. Because Babson isn’t as selective as those institutions, and business majors typically don’t earn as much as, say, computer engineers, Babson’s statistically adjusted earnings also stand out.

在这样的评分标准下巴布森大学占尽优势。巴布森的本科专业毕业后能取得商务学士学位。Payscale的网站数据报告中显示巴布森的毕业生在初入职场时年薪能拿到60,000美元，十多年后年薪可高达123,000美元。这些数据使巴布森毕业生的收入水平可以跟哈佛、普林斯顿、斯坦福以及加州理工的毕业生收入水平比肩。由于巴布森大学并不如那些名牌大学被考生优先考虑，并且，商科专业通常不会像电脑工程师那样的工科赚得多，因此巴布森在数据统计中的收入分数调整上也会有很明显的上调。

Over all, the Money list of top-earning colleges is a mix of elite universities with a pipeline to high-paying finance and management consulting jobs, and colleges like Cooper Union and the Colorado School of Mines, which are tightly focused on specific, well-paying professions.

总的来说，财富周刊的毕业后收入最高大学排行榜汇集各所有有关高薪金融管理咨询专业的精英大学，以及像这样专业与高薪职业紧密联系起来的大学。

Defining outcomes this way does ignore important aspects of the collegiate mission. At its best, higher education does more than train people for jobs. College should clarify the mind and enlighten the soul. But colleges also expect to be paid in dollars, and you can’t provide evidence of enlightenment in lieu of installments on your student loans.

然而，用这样的方法定义大学成果的确是忽略了大学教育使命中重要的方面。最佳的高等教育成果不仅仅是训练人们的职业技能。大学应该是为学生们理清思路，启迪心灵的。但是大学也需要美元来支持它的教育事业，而你却没有证据表明大学启示了你如何分期还清学费贷款的。

This conflict is on the minds of Obama administration officials currently deciding how to rate colleges. There will be some thorny methodological issues for the administration to work out. The Money rankings formula allows unusual performance on a few factors, like earnings or net price, to drive a college all the way to the top of its rankings — or the bottom.

奥巴马政府官员在针对该如何评价大学这一问题上因为这个争议而伤脑筋。以后还会有更多棘手的问题等着官员们去解决。财富周刊的排名方法让一所大学因为一些像收入或者净学费这种非常用大学排名参考的因素而名列前茅或者垫底。

Morehouse College, for example, is a highly respected historically black institution in Atlanta. But because its students and their parents, many of whom come from low-income families, borrow substantial sums for college and sometimes struggle to repay their loans, Money ranks Morehouse second to last out of 665 institutions.

例如莫尔豪斯学院是亚特兰大一直受人尊敬的黑人学院。但是由于它的许多学生及家长都来自低收入家庭，他们借大量的钱来上大学，有时还很难还清贷款，财富周刊就把莫尔豪斯学院排在了665所学院之后。

The Obama administration could use a more balanced approach. It also has access to better information about student earnings. Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution has found that Payscale earnings estimates are 14 percent higher, on average, than calculations made with more complete data sets. That may be because the unemployed don’t have earnings to enter into the website in the first place. Since this limitation applies to all colleges equally, it’s less of a problem for rank-ordering institutions. But it doesn’t account for the possibility that well-paid Babson College business majors are just unusually enthusiastic about seeing how their salaries stack up.

奥巴马政府可以用一种更公平的办法来进行排名。他们也可以去获取更完备的学生收入信息。布鲁金斯学院的马太·琴格斯发现Payscale网站上的收入估计平均比更全面的收入数据统计高出14%。这也许是因为那些还未入职的毕业生压根没有收入去注册纳入该网站的统计范围内。由于这种限制条件对于所有的大学都一样，所以在排名机构看来都不算什么问题。但这并不代表收入不错的巴布森大学商务专业的学生一直热衷于看到他们的薪水是如何在这些杂志的评分中叠高的。

The federal government, by contrast, has earnings data for the vast majority of workers, as reported to the Social Security Administration. The Department of Education is already using this data to evaluate programs at for-profit colleges, and it could easily apply the same approach to public and private nonprofit institutions. The more complicated question is how to fairly evaluate earnings outcomes at colleges with diverse academic missions and student bodies.

相比之下，根据社会安全局的报告，联邦政府拥有绝大多数工作者的收入数据。教育局早已经用这些数据来评估盈利性大学的项目，并且这样的方法也很容易运用到公共与个人非营利机构。更复杂的问题是该如何公平地评估各个不同学科以及学生群体大学的收入结果。

With higher education prices continuing to rise and college degrees remaining a crucial ticket to economic prosperity, it’s certain that someone will rank the economic payoff of going to different colleges. Money’s attempt is one of the best, and more are sure to come.

在高等教育的费用持续增加，大学学位依旧是经济水平保持繁荣的关键因素的情况下，一些人通过对上不同的大学后所得到的经济回报进行排名也是意料之中的事情。从金钱的角度来进行大学排名的尝试是最佳排名方案中的其中之一，更多角度的排名也一定会出现。

原文转自：

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/upshot/building-a-better-college-ranking-system-babson-beats-harvard.html?_r=0&abt=0002&ab

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