The Economist newspaper ranked Linfield College as the number one college in Oregon and the 27th in the nation based on economic value.

The rankings are based on how much students earn after college in comparison to how much they are expected to earn with their given degree.

Many statistics are taken into consideration in the estimates, including SAT scores, sex ratio, racial diversity and the size of the college in question.

This was The Economist’s first foray into school rankings and they went about it in a slightly different way than US News and other rating systems have.

“The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its students subsequently earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere,” according to the article that appeared in The Economist.

This shows that alumni of the school often see a positive difference between actual and expected earnings.

Vice President of Enrollment Dan Preston says, “Obviously there are more reasons to go to college than just a paycheck, but that has to be an important part of the decision.”

Linfield ranked higher than Reed College, George Fox, and other private, liberal arts colleges in Oregon.

The second ranked school in Oregon is LaGrande’s Eastern Oregon University at 216th.

Apart from ranking higher than 18 other colleges in Oregon, Linfield was also ranked 27th in the nation among the 1,275 colleges included on The Economist’s scorecard.

The newspaper did acknowledge that their scorecard had several problems with its generality, “They only include individuals who applied for federal financial aid … And they only track students’ salaries for ten years after they start college, cutting off their trajectory at an age when many eventual high earners are still in graduate school and thus excluded from the sample of incomes.”

They also recognized that colleges they deemed “underperforming” could be “making a far greater contribution to American society than “overperformers” if they produced brilliant graduates who went into public service instead of Wall Street.

After the first scorecard was published, the newspaper revised it several times due to inaccuracy.
The newspaper did offer the assurance that “the vast majority of universities moved by no more than a handful of places.”

The Economist ended their listing with a warning, “For students who want to know which colleges are likely to boost their future salaries by the greatest amount, given their qualifications and preferences regarding career and location, we hope these rankings prove helpful. They should not be used for any other purpose.”

Overall, this ranking shows that Linfield has a positive effect on both the present and future lives of its students.