Academic First Year Experiences

College Rankings: CSUN is #5, Harvard is #438

October 17, 2014

Alpine lake with distant mountain.
Social Mobility Index

 

CSUN ranks fifth (out of 539 institutions) on the new "social mobility index" for U.S. colleges. Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman explains what this means (and discusses some of the limitations of the ranking) in his report at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/harvard-is-no--438-in-these-college-rankings-191356253.html:

"The SMI rankings are meant to highlight schools that do the best job of helping disadvantaged students graduate with the ability to start a career free of crushing levels of debt. Five criteria determine the SMI rankings: tuition, percentage of the student body from low-income households, graduation rate, salaries of grads once they start working, and the size of each school’s endowment."